Website help

[DAZDA]

I realise this is a bit out there even for an 'off topic' section, but I'm hoping a few of you webpage savvy people could give me some advice.  I’ve got some idea when it comes to IT (I spend a significant proportion of my day job writing VB code), but I am not as clued up on webpage building and hosting.  I’d like to build my own (I have already written a simple website in html on my PC) and then have a good/reliable/not too expensive company host it.  I’m pretty sure I’ve got the domain name all sorted and registered, however I would like some recommendations on hosts, and information on building and protecting your own webpage (techniques, software, reference material, etc).

 

At this stage the website will only be an information site about a business and the services it provides, but later I might like to add secure information transfer or payment mechanisms, so info on encryption or secure payment options would be good too.

 

In other words, I’m okay with the actual html coding, I just have limited knowledge about the rest.  Any advice would be appreciated.  Feel free to PM me if you prefer.

 

Thanks,

DAZDA

[Linton]

Hey Dazda

 

I have look after our local ulysses website and use cleverdotcom to host it, very reasonable $90 for three years, I use web easy pro to build it also very easy to use about $80 to buy and here is the link to our web site please check it out

http://www.greentriangleulysses.com/

 

Linton

[benny]

hey dazda,

 

im a web / graphic designer and use webcity.com.au to host most of my accounts. Very reliable, great service, very cheap and servers are based in Australia.

 

i use wordpress for all basic webpages but for more complex systems I use drupal. Both have a large following and resources and modules are readily available. For coding i use a mac and use the program Coda, Notepad and Photoshop for design!!

 

My Website is liquidlime.com.au

 

Hope this helps,

 

Ben

[NZeder]

I also use a clever hosted service and like benny has stated on of those for my site nzederdotnet.

[Mr Camouflage]

I've had nostalgic trio hosted on a free hosting plan for the last 3 or so years with no issues. It's at byethost.com on a free plan. Doesn't get much cheaper than free

[gav240z]

At this stage the website will only be an information site about a business and the services it provides, but later I might like to add secure information transfer or payment mechanisms, so info on encryption or secure payment options would be good too.

Thanks,

DAZDA

 

In terms of secure payments you don't have to worry too much about it if your only a small business or doing relatively small transactions. There are plenty of secure payment providers out there who take care of all the processing and credit card details. You can even use PayPal to do this kind of thing if you want.

 

The processing is usually done off your own domain, so you don't have to worry about secure certificates or any of the encryption because that's handled by the payment gateway.

 

If you want your own secure certification and to host your own payments on your own domain it's quite expensive and you need to have certain security in place (physical) where your servers are hosted, since they are receiving credit card details etc.. It doesn't sound like you are ready for this step yet anyway.

 

Basically what happens when you use a 3rd party to process payments is that a visitor to your site (let's say has a shopping cart) adds items to their cart.

 

When they are ready to pay, you have a form (usually with hidden fields / values) that contain all the transaction information - from the shopping cart. This is passed to the payment gateway along with the total price for the sale. They enter their credit card details and then when it's verified the visitor is sent back to your domain. At this point you can usually get a "token" or authentication from the payment gateway to state the transaction was successful.

 

The payment gateway often takes a small percentage of the total sale as commission.

 

So I guess it depends on what you are planning on doing? And potentially the type of site you wish to run.

 

When it comes to CMS systems like Benny mentioned Wordpress and Drupal are both good and flexible systems. Drupal is not nearly as User-Friendly. Both are written in PHP which in itself can sometimes be less than ideal for security. I use Drupal for parts of this website, and the goal was to convert the entire site over, but for now that's on hold.

 

I am actually learning Python right now (which is what the web development framework Django https://www.djangoproject.com/ is based on). The reason I'm heading in this direction is that CMS systems will take you so far, but eventually (and depending on what you want to do) you will reach a point where perhaps the CMS won't easily do what you want or you reach a stage where you have to compromise.

 

After years of messing around with CMS's I wanted to extend my programming skills and where I work Python is 1 of the core languages we use. So I figured it was time to dive in.

 

Again all of this depends on where you want to go, but as a programmer you might want the Freedom to use your own code rather than mould your skills to use an existing CMS and it's own workflow etc..