Choosing a web hosting provider? how do I decide!

Right so, I have a very basic website up and created on a non live platform (my computer). I would like to see how everything runs when it is live and on the web. So, originally if you had read some of my earlier posts I was debating using a free web hosting provider.

However I have decided against doing so because plain and simply I would like something that would give me more control and overall I would like this to be a long term progression. I don’t want to set up a website on a free hosting provider and then six months down the line have to move everything over and duplicate what I had spent so many hours creating again for another paid web host.  So that’s my reasons to choose a low cost web host within certain parameters.

Firstly, I want a web host that I have full control of my account. That means, I want to check their pricing tables and their inclusive features and decide on what I want exactly. Speaking to a friend of mine (who is a web designer by trade), he suggests that I go with one that offers me full control over PHP, E-Mail and a few other things I forgot what he said! Although between writing this and actually choosing I will get in contact again and find out exactly the details.

Low cost, UK web host… do they exist?

So, I have a few to choose from, of course there are the complete giants in the business like host gator or godaddy. Many people will choose the bigger brand names purely down to the fact they have been in the business a long time. On the other hand, I have been looking at reviews of such huge Goliath companies and there are some very unhappy customers. I know you can’t say they offer a bad service on a ‘few’ customers purely because they have some many its bound to happen. But there are some questions being ask regarding customer service on trust pilot and such websites that make me wonder if they are the right hosts for me or not.

So, from looking at the big names, I decided to have a look at some of the smaller names, for example https://auqhost.com with their supposedly low cost, UK web hosting services. From what I had looked at, I was actually pretty impressed. Again I went on Trustpilot to have a look and see what people had said. They had a lot less customers than I had seen with the other two big name companies however, It seemed they were pretty decent at customer service. They are running Cloud Hosting services, I had a look what that means. It seems from the people in the know, cloud hosting is a great option for websites like mine, as it is hosted on a network of computers, giving huge reliability improvements.

Price-wise its always hard to find the absolute cheapest. However, with the smaller companies I have seen, you tend to either get more control-ability over your hosting account and your options to improve your websites performance. As well as the customer service always seems to be much better than the larger companies.

Decisions time, who do I go with? Web hosting is a tricky game

Im not making any decisions yet, however, stay tuned and I will post an in depth review of the company i decide to go with.. if your bored and don’t want to read about stuff like that I don’t blame you.

Just an update.. Ive managed to learn how to add a JQuery accordion to my page

As the title says, I have managed to get the Jquery accordion up and running on my homepage. This is plain and simply just an exercise for myself to learn how to implement java script into my webpages.  It has worked ultra-successfully.

How did I do it?

Well, firstly I downloaded the files from their official webpage which are the backbone of what you need. Accompanied with the jscript files, I had a lot of .css files which I could edit on their webpage to fit my websites look. So it took me around 15 minutes to get it exactly what and how I wanted it.

Once I had done that, I had to change the URL of the style sheets and add them to my home page. This enabled the style sheets to be loaded onto my homepage.

Then, this is the hard bit, using the divs and functions I had found on various website tutorial sites. I had managed to compile a load of functions that somehow converted into a fancy accordion. I am not so sure in what  I plan on putting into the actual accordion but either way It functions!

If you would like to learn for yourself how to do such a thing, then follow this link here which will give you a great step by step account of how to incoporate javascript into your HTML files.

It is definitely worth the time to learn and understand how to do it correctly, because as I found out myself it can be a bit of nightmare if you are not sure what you are doing. You can cause yourself a lot of problems down the line if you just cram random pieces of javascript into your web pages.

A little change of topic coming soon

As it is getting closer to putting up a live version of my website, I am going to look at some web hosting. I was originally planning on using just a free service from Yahoo or one of the many other free web hosting providers. However, I want a little more control than what the free providers offer.

So I am going to do a few posts in a mini-series and look at what I need from a web host, and talk about the kind of packages available today for beginners.  In my next post I will do a brief overview of web hosts and what they offer for what price. Once I have done that I will continue on with the theme of web design, integrating the odd different topic in here and there.

If you have read this far, thank you!

I want to add some shadow to my DIV boxes… How?

So far I have succeeded creating my very basic website layout. However, Im not done. Not by a long shot. I have the basic two column layout with a header and a footer done. I am trying to get the layout just perfect, in both function and looks.

So, after all that now I have moved onto the presentation of the actual layout (eg, colours, spacing and all that good stuff). Im going to use flat colors from this UI website. Flat colors look great, are attractive and a lot of modern really high profile websites use them.  Im going to follow the trend and use them myself.

Ive gone with a really nice green, which UI colors have labelled ‘Green Sea’ This will be used for the header and footer, I think If I used it anywhere else it will be way too overpowering. So, to compliment the green I am looking at using light greys (silver more specifically) a flat silver, that has a really nice bright glow to it.  This will be used for the actual content partition of my website.

I really want to finish of the content box well though, so, I am going to try and add some shadow to the bottom of the div, to make it look like it is jumping off the page when you see it.  I have seen a lot of websites incorporate it, and sometimes go the complete wrong way with it. But I just want to use it ever so lightly to make it have some kind of shape.

Ive used this to get the basic idea of how to add shadow.  It looks kind of rubbish. So I had a little search around on Google at the various suggestions other websites have made into tackling shadow, and I consequently found this website creation tutorial page. This is great! exactly what Im looking for. I can just play around with a couple of these to get it absolutely perfect.

Heres one of the examples from the tutorial I linked abot

box-shadow: 10px 10px;
box-shadow: 10px 10px 5px #888;
box-shadow: inset 2px 2px 2px 2px black;
box-shadow: 10px 10px #888, -10px -10px #f4f4f4, 0px 0px 5px 5px #cc6600;

Overall, adding shadow to my content box has given it some focus, and a slight visual improvement. I plan on tweaking it until I think its just about perfect. The next big issue I have is I have put all the .css information into the actual HTML page and not a .css file. That will be what I plan on sorting out within the next couple of days. It has to be on my priorities list otherwise It will get just way too out of hand.

Using Float to arrange my web page columns

So, like I said in my previous post, I am going to use divs and the float ability to arrange my columns which will be the back bone of my web page.

This has been very tricky for me to learn, I am not good at this (really not good) so it has taken me quite a while to read and understand the actual functions of some of these functions. From what I gather, I need to apply the float:left; mechanic to all my boxes within a ‘container’ div to allow them to function correctly.

I have been using this guide HERE, to show me what I am exactly doing, copying what they say and replicating it on my Dreamweaver document. However once I have got their tutorial piece of code to work, I am tweaking it to my own advantage.

Obviously, once they are aligned how I want them to be, I need to look at adding a margin or some padding, so the content of each div doesn’t clash with the content from its neighbor.  I have gone with two columns on the main page,  a header and a footer. So I have given my menu bar a margin right of 25px which will give me some clearance between the content and the menu.

The footer I have given a top margin so I have some clearance above, and the header some bottom margin for the same reason. It is really starting to take shape. I am very please with the ‘layout’.

Now the next step for me is to add some color, and start identifying the columns with some great color options and some different styles.  I haven’t picked a font or anything like that yet but once Im done with getting the layout sorted as in where everything is going I will return to pick my font at a later time. Im still unsure as to what I want to use!

Guys, remember if you are new to all this like me, then why don’t you check out some of the sites I have used to help you along the way. There are plenty of free resources which will give you a great helping hand!

Stage 1 – Adding color and using ‘div’s

So far in this conquest I have been able to make simple, very simple introductory pages with html, using H1 tags and getting to grips with the small specifics for example body and head tags.

Now Ive got that down per say, Im looking at trying to make something a little more attractive. As in I don’t want a white page with nothing on! Reading around I have found out that tables are a thing of the past for laying out a website, and can be a hindrance to being found on search engines ( something else I will have to look at ). So ghastly tables out, using Divs in.

So what is a div?

A div is a fluid entity that can have pre-designed characteristics set with using a style-sheet(?). You can use them as columns, as a table itself and just to position text within an container. So, it seems, from what Ive read you can do a lot with these Divs. However, I have no idea what Im doing or how to use them. So Im going to start from scratch, by using divs to posotion the rough areas of my website, these being the menu, content area and a footer for links and all that good stuff.

Positioning my website

Im going to use the guide Im readings layout, because coincidentally it is exactly what Im looking for! I am not using an external style-sheet for now, however I will change over to one when I plan on getting my website online for an actual purpose.

This is what I want my end product to look like, so obviously I have used divs for each section, using float and percentage based widths so it is somewhat responsive and will fit all browsers.  In fact I have been reading around using either px or percentages, and I have decided I would like to preferably use percentages to position my content areas to add an aspect of responsiveness to my pages.

Where to start? HTML very basics!

So far, I have found out many things relating to web design. However I am here to start from the very beginning.

 

What is HTML?

Right, so HTML from what Ive read is called a markup language. Meaning it consists of a vast array of tags and commands which will display information of various sorts in a number of different styles or formats. This is a very basic description of what it actually is. However, since im a complete newbie to all this, its a good start for me to even know this much!

My first blank page

So I opened up Dreamweaver to my first blank HTML page. Looking at the guide im using, this is what I start with. The basics of the HTML tag to describe the document. The Body tag to allow some structure of the page and the H1 tag I believe is for headings. 

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>

<h1>My First Heading</h1>

<p>My first paragraph.</p>

</body>
</html>
 

Once I had put this into Dreamweaver, I then saved it as a .html document and opened it up in my chosen website browser to see what I had done and if it was correct. It was.

This was my first absolute piece of HTML code. Even though it was barely a ‘page’ and was just 6 words. It was enough to allow me to see some success already! My next step in this long drawn out process is to start adding color, and arrange text in different manners. Learn about how to align stuff and make it look correct and proper!

 

My first website journey – the starting point

Welcome everyone to my newest venture on the internet. With this wonderful blog, I plan to record and track how I go about creating my first website. Bare in mind I am a complete newbie to all things web design related I have no idea what I am doing. So if you are a fellow newbie, It may be worth following along to get some hints and ideas how not to do certain things!

I am going to start simply, by creating a basic HTML website. I really want to look at using some kind of software that will allow me to update it easily. However I plan on learning the very basics first.

I have been looking around websites like w3school.com for great tips on the basics of HTML, however it is definitely more complicated than I had previously thought it would be. It doesn’t deter me tho, I am in this for the long run and will proceed slowly but steadily.

My stage 1 (initial strategy) for completing such a huge task is:

1. Learn the basics of HTML.
2. Start putting it into practice on a Free web hosting site
3. learn about anything else HTML related, how to create cool unique pages with some different abilities on
4. lean about javascript to try and help my pages be a bit more dynamic

This is the basics of where I will start, however while completing my step 1 strategy, If I come across something important more so that I think I should incorporate into my knowledge, I will add in along the way.

To complement what I plan on doing I have bought a copy of Dreamweaver, the HTML editing program. Hopefully this may give me a bit more of an idea of layout and things like that. Either way I need to learn it from the bare bones so to speak.

After my mastery of the basics like HTML, I would love to learn PHP. This is where it will really start to get tricky I imagine.  However there is a wealth of resources all over the internet which should give me a great head start into the world of web design. I will probably also end up buying a PHP & MySQL book to help me as it is a lot more complex and complicated than basic HTML.