Host with sitebuilder etc for our club

Reesy

Hi guys,

Had a look thru recent posts & didn't (quite) find this...

Our association has a very limited website (www.dublinbees.org) which I manage, and I'd like to tidy it up and add some features like a blog, a decent gallery, a members' area and basic ecommerce functionality (prob just some buttons to Paypal or Google checkout). I looked at webs.com & was keen till I read the reviews - http://www.hostsearch.com/review/webcom_review.asp - which put me off. Of course, I can't tell whether the reviews are kosher!

Anyone able to recommend a trustworthy review site for web hosting packages?

Thanks!

EKRIUQ

What you really need is a content management solution that will look after all your imputing of information and you can add picture galleries and blogs and other useful widgets. A lot of hosts offer these solutions and they can be installed by 1 click if your unused to installing them yourself.

I recommend Joomla http://www.joomla.org/ thousands of extensions and some great templates out there a lot of them fee. Does have a bit of a learning curve but I've been using it now for a number of years and find it great.

Others would be;

http://www.wordpress.org
http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/
http://silverstripe.org/

Reesy

Thanks EKRIUQ. Your comment reminds me that I should have said that I won't be looking after the site for ever, so it'd be good if it was usable by someone with no web development skills at all. Beekeepers tend not to be IT tecchies!

Hoku

Reesy wrote: »

...it'd be good if it was usable by someone with no web development skills at all. Beekeepers tend not to be IT tecchies!

Another reason to settle with Joomla. Yes, it takes time to get used to it but it's quite manageable. The only technical aspect of Joomla is the developing of the template, which would probably only be done once. You could get around it altogether and just use a free theme, many of which are available on the Internet.

Because Joomla doesn't need any complex server-side extensions, you can install it on pretty much any basic hosting package that has PHP and MySQL. Sure you have to pay for hosting, but you can get it quite cheap.

And in case you haven't noticed, Boardsies have a chance of getting a year of free hosting every week. I won this competition a few months ago and everybody seems to be really happy with the speed of the website, about and I have no complaints the tech support I received. But it's entirely up to you where you want to host.
I would suggest a host with a datacentre in Europe, if not Ireland or the UK. You'd be much happier than if you were to host in the US I'm just talking from personal experience.

As for the hosting reviews... Just try: http://www.google.ie/search?q=hosting+reviews
I can't really recommend any particular site, you'll always get some reviews saying that the service is terrible and some saying that it's superb.

Reesy

Thanks HOKU. I'll investigate Joomla, & your comments on hosting make a lot of sense!