web hosting question...

[smiling gecko]

i am at the first steps of creating a website. my domain name is registered with godaddy.com

as a complete rookie i have lots 'o simple questions and have minimal computer skills. there seems to be no shortage of hosting services.

thinking of hosting my site with godaddy.com just to keep things simple. they have 24/7 customer service and i was quoted $47.00 annual hosting fee.

looking to use wordpress and/or concrete5 to build my "starter site". it doesn't look like there are any easy answers or easy steps.

wondering if i could get some insights and thoughts on this process from someone else who started at my level AND some suggestions from the reaaalllly technically savvy folks who can "dumb this down" a bit for me.

i don't mind learning what needs to be done and would feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment doing so.

breathe,relax, and enjoy.

sg

 

[CorreCaminos]

I've registered many websites with godaddy and I think they are great for that. Definitely much better than register.com

I use other companies (Crystaltech, Cartika and others) for web hosting services depending on what services I need and, sometimes, their physical location.

I consider web hosting and email services from the Internet registrars to be slow and lack sophistication but I don't know if this is the case with goddady. I'd recommend checking Crystaltech and see what they can do for you; they are tops. I don't use them anymore because I need the hosting company to be located in either Dallas or Houston, otherwise I'd still have all the websites with them.

If you use Wordpress, or any other widely used scripts, make sure to keep the software updated to prevent someone from hacking your website.

 

[tlitody]

Wordpress is a powerful piece of software but it was never designed for being used as a web gallery and I have never found a gallery plugin for it that was any good. On the other hand, if you want a photo blog with images just inserted in the flow of the text then its fine.
The CMS for it is very generic as its designed to suit all sorts of uses. i.e. not specifically photo websites. And if you want to make images available for sale then I would suggest you go with a company who specifically host artist and photography based websites. You then just pay them for hosting and they provide the website.

http://www.clikpic.com/

is a good and cheap one with inbuilt paypal sales. And they DON'T take a percenatge of sales. They have some nice templates too.

But if you really want a blog style site then wordpress is better.

here's a site I built ( http://www.tidel.biz/gallery/ ) which uses wordpress for the image gallery which is designed a very specific way to fit the existing non wordpress site. i.e. I built a wordpress template from the original site layout. Works well for just showing what client does and makes it easy for people to find what what they are looking for. pretty basic but you have to understand wordpress loop and how to build your own template and that is one big learning curve for someone who doesn't know php css or html. That is why the clikpic site above will save you massive amounts of time and have good functional site up and running in a day or two with no coding. i.e. you concentrate on content and not coding.

 

[sara]

You can download gallery themes for Wordpress nowdays though and just upload them easily. I use Wordpress for my photo blog, but it's not a gallery based template.

 

[Luna]

What do you want your "starter site" to do?
Show off gallery? Read like a blog? A portfolio?

 

[tlitody]

The best place for learning wordpress is at the wordpress site where there docs which explain everything. There's an awful lot of them.
A word of caution. A lot of wordpress themes and plugins fail when wordpress gets updated to latest version. So if your site uses plugins or themes from someone else, its often not safe to upgrade to latest version of wordpress until the third party builder of the plugin/theme has upgraded there plugin/theme to work in latest version of wordpress. Often that doesn't happen so you are stuck with older version of wordpress unless you switch to another plugin or theme. It can get very messy and sometimes different plugins can conflict with each other. i.e. they are not all written as well as they should be.