DIY Doctor UK DIY Forums

I while ago a friend wanted a web site and I spent a lot of time and effort learning how to get the web site found. It no longer exists but due to that work I was confident I could do something with my local RAYNET web site specially as when I looked it had obvious faults like lang set to en-US rather than en-UK. No sitemap.xml was another so I was given the job to re-write so it was both found and would be listed as British.

However when I came to do it I found there was no FTP access and no scripts, widgets, apps or buttons were allowed or the use of ones own templates or HTML code.

It was it seemed designed to be simple it was called Simplesite so I suppose it will suit many to be able publish a web page which is really easy to alter and not really sure if that's not a good idea anyway then anyone can take over the pages.

Cure would seem to be to write a second site and link both together at least until second site is found by web crawlers. However as to which is another matter. Other friend used one to one which seems very good but costs and already paying for one web site. For myself tried biz.nf/ which works in a fashion but often stalls and one has to try again latter. Also tried 000webhost.com/ which gives xxxxxx.freeiz.com as page address also stalls as some times of day and often has banners on the page advertising itself. There is also other sites like 50megs.com again loads of adverts and google which is like Simplesite with very little one can do to the site.

So ideas please what would be I suppose the way is a web site which can if works out well be expanded. Once found and up and running paying for site is not so bad but don't want to use a site which again latter fails.

It is quite cheap to buy web hosting and they work so much better than free sites. You will always struggle to get a free site hosted. I would recommend one.com, they only charge about £10 for the first year, and you get a free domain.

Then install Wordpress. It is the easiest way to build a website. Most hosts will have an automatic installer for Wordpress, so you just click a button and it installs everything you need to get started. You can start your site with a free theme, then if it takes off upgrade to a premium or customised theme.

Simplesite like Wordpress and many others have temples and is extremely easy to use.

However once you get beyond the simple then they fail. With the first site I built for some one else we had a problem. We wanted to have a presentation showing at least pairs of pictures with accompanying text to lead the viewer through the points we wanted to deliver.

Software which changed pictures was around but change a pair with text was something else.

Getting search engines to find the site was another problem. Some really odd facts we found into how the web spiders identify ones site and promote it.

This it would seems starts at the domain name and names ending with .co.uk will be better for us than .co.nf or freeiz.com and clearly we would need to pay to get a good name. simplesite.com is clearly not a good name and not having the ability in the meta data to show it's a UK site makes it even worse.

If one considers what an event organiser is likely to type into google to find some one to help with radio coms in their area "Flintshire radio coms" seems a likely google search. But because I have no control as to the contents of "sitemap.xml" instead of this finding the home page it finds the Photo Album first which just says "Flintshire Raynet meet the 2nd Tuesday of every month" which means nothing unless you already know what RAYNET is and is wrong anyway that was changed but without access to sitemap.xml or meta data there is nothing I can do to ensure one the data shown is correct and two bring up home page not one way down in the priority settings if I had assess to it.