Foreign Perspectives

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Website development blogs are all over the Internet if you care to look for them and they’re pretty good places to look for insights as to how you might do something or other.

Typical of a general web design blog is the one over at Stylish Design which, as with most blogs, doesn’t stick slavishly to it’s theme so in amongst articles such as the rather useful piece on web design basics and one on creating an adwords campaign you’ll find ones such as the off-topic but no less interesting for that one on cycling through Italy.

The site isn’t all fluff articles as many such blogs tend to fill up with and contains some fairly technical pieces on Perl and the like with a nice mix of articles overall.

Popularity: 15% [?]

I’ve been plugging away at the weekends with my new Wordpress template over at SevaTeem for the last month or so and interestingly it’s starting to get hits from people looking how to do things like add extra sidebars and whatnot.

Whilst it’ll be a while before it’s ready to roll out to the world at large I’ve started using it on a couple of blogs to see how it flies in real-life. Personally Chosen uses an early version of the template with a very plain look. Slightly more along the lines of what the finished template might look like is the new Our Inns blog although there’s still work to be done as you’ll see if you glance at the SevaTeem blog itself.

What’s surprised me is that there really isn’t an awful lot of work required to create your very own Wordpress theme and whilst I figure I’ve a few more weeks work to tidy things up, the theme is good enough to let me use it on a few sites already.

Popularity: 6% [?]

You’d think that choosing a new hosting service for your sites would be a fairly easy affair but the choice available these days makes it something of a chore.

In fact, there are two separate things that you’re doing which complicates life a little more. First of all you need somewhere to register your domain name and secondly you need somewhere to hold the website for that domain.

Many people go with the same place to do both but that’s a big mistake. Certainly you can often get offers of a free domain with some hosting but in reality it’s only saving you $10 or so per year. If you’ve several domains then you need to look at the costs involved in registering the others with your hosting service and in some cases that’s substantially more than the $10 that you actually need to pay. However, that’s not the biggest problem: if you fall out with your hosting service you can find that they make it very difficult to move to a new one whereas if the domain is registered elsewhere you just switch the name servers and you’re out.

Step two is selecting somewhere to store your new website and that’s where you need to think about what you actually need. For example, when I ran the little selection over at Web Hosting Choice with my basic requirements (under $10/month, 1GB webspace, 20GB/month bandwidth, cpanel) it threw up 84 options. Now, it is possible to lower the numbers somewhat to 11 if you add in that you want a rating above 7 but the problem with that is that obviously not everyone rates their hosting on that site and therefore the overall rating figures aren’t overlly dependable. Certainly you’d not want to be choosing a place with a rating of 1 or 2 but you can’t really thin out the numbers much beyond that. Also worth watching is that the hosting services regularly increase the facilities that you get in a package so when I searched for our current host it didn’t come up at all because it’s listed as providing 500MB storage whereas it actually provides 10 times that now.

Popularity: 53% [?]