pctoolbox.co.uk

Take a look at the latest package to be introduced by Wild Hosting!

‘Wild Hosting is pleased to be able to offer Wild.Mail a service where people can have their own domain name and therefore personalised email address without a website.

Why are we excited about offering this service?

• More and more people are wanting a unique and special email address that is different from the normal ISP email or a free web based alternative.
• Fancy something like firstname@lastname.me.uk? or yourname@yourhouse.me.uk?
• Really making use of the pretty unused .me.uk domain suffix you can have an email address for you and your family that is special and independent of your email provider.
• You don’t have to stick with me.uk if you don’t want to, pick any available domain and we can set it up for you!
• Download your emails through you favourite email program such as Microsoft Outlook/Windows Mail/Thunderbird and if you are on the move and need to check your mail, find somewhere with an internet connection and quickly and easily log onto our webmail service and check your messages there!’

This will cost you just £12 per year + VAT!

For more info check out wildhosting.co.uk!

Over the past 12 days we’ve recommended 12 different retailers to you for Christmas present ideas.  As we are at the end of it all we thought it would be a good idea for us to do a quick review of who the 12 retailers were.

1. Apple
2. 123-Reg
3. Dell
4. Amazon
5. AVG
6. Misco
7. CD WOW
8. Dabs
9. HMV
10. PC World
11. The Carphone Warehouse
12. I Want One Of Those

Which retailers have you used?  Who is your favourite retailer?

Our retailer for the Second Day of Christmas is 123-reg.co.uk.  123-Reg sell domain names and hosting for websites.  So if you have to buy a present for a computer addict this would be a great present to get them blogging on the Internet in 2009!

Need some help with setting up a website?  Check out our Quick Tip Series on Basic Website Setup!

Part three in our Basic Website Setup Series! So far we have looked at

• Part 1 – Domain Names
• Part 2 – Hosting

This week we are looking at Site Building Tools.  Now professionals tend to use a program called Dreamweaver by Adobe, or something similar. However for beginners this is a steep learning curve and one that can often be avoided.

We recommend that you use a pre-written tool to create your site and manage it as well. For most people a simple blogging tool will be more than enough, however for those that want something more they will need a Content Management System (or CMS for short!).

The tool you use will need to work with your hosting provider, for this tip we are going to work with tools that come with Fantastico as that is often installed on the control panel of a Linux hosting package.

For full details on how to install these tools you will need to see your hosting providers support pages, but just to give you an idea. You can log into your control panel (cPanel) and select fantastico and without any programming or web building knowledge install tools such as:

• WordPress (our favourite)
• Nucleus
• Joomla
• Mambo
• PHP-Nuke

The first two are Blogging tools and the last 3 are CMS tools. Our favourite is WordPress, it is easy to use, easy to install, there are many themes and plugins available to make a site that does just what you need it to.  Check out our User’s Review of WordPress here.

With a tool like this you just have to learn to use their Admin area, which in my opinion is much easier than learning Dreamweaver and getting messy with an FTP application. It often involves just filling in form types pages to get your content online!

Once your domain and hosting is setup (see your hosting provider on how to do this, you will need to point the nameserves of your domain to your hosting space) you can literally have a site up and running in minutes with a tool like the ones we have listed, all that takes the time is you coming up with valuable content to put on it!

I hope this helped, let me know if you have any thoughts or comments or if you get a site up and running like this link us to it!

Last week we looked at Domain Names, this week, Hosting! To have a website that is accessible to everyone it needs to be stored on a computer somewhere, and one that is permentantly connected to the internet as well. This can be done yourself on a computer at home but if you are thinking along those lines then these posts are not for you. Most people, especially beginners choose to host their website with a hosting company.

A Web Hosting company will provide space on a server where you can host (store the files of) your website. They also often offer other features such as:

• POP3 email accounts
• Database support (e.g. MySql, MSSQL)
• Site Building Tools
• eCommerce Tools

For a starter site you are unlikely to need a hugely expensive package, Brandstar’s hosting company Wildhosting.co.uk offer a starter package for just £12.50+vat, which is perfect for many, especially home users. Things to look for when buying your hosting pacakge:

1. Amount of Disk Space, usually measured in either MB (Megabytes) or GB (Gigabytes)
2. Bandwith – when a visitor comes to your site and views it they use some of the bandwidth you have been allocated to download the text information, images etc.
3. Email accounts, it is far more professional to have sales@mycompany.com rather than my_company_sales@hotmail.com!
4. The platform the server offering hosting on, either Linux or Windows. If the tool you want to use is written in PHP then you will want a Linux host, if it is written with asp/aspx then you will want a Windows host.

Often Linux hosts have Fantastico installed which helps beginners install tools to use on their website, such as WordPress, which we will look at next week! This saves you uploading your own choice of tool to your site and configuring the database!

A few exampls of hosting companies:

• Wildhosting
• 123-Reg *
• Fasthosts
• Rackspace
• GoDaddy

So there we are, hopefully you know enough now to start investigating which hosting package you want. Next week we can talk through some tools you can use to build your site!

*this link is an affiliate link, we have to run the site somehow if you want a link without the affiliate link then try this one: www.123-reg.co.uk. Please note, our affiliate status has no effect on us recommending 123-Reg.