Nimbus

Can anyone recomend an good web hosting service? This is for a retail type business and may need the option of on-line payments in the future.

Thanks

Phil

www.titanhosts.net

*smiles*

Hi there,

You could give us a try www.Verio.co.uk

We do the hosting for Prodrive's swrt.com - http://swrt.verio.co.uk

Depending on your level/ complexity of Hosting you require, we offer different Hosting Platforms and Plans.

There is the PowerPlatform Hosting for medium and large enterprises utliises Dedicated Servers. or Shared Hosting for indidividuals and small businesses

These are outlined @
http://web.verio.co.uk/hosting/

You may want to look at the VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting we offer - http://hosting.verio.co.uk/index.php...naged_vps.html

Much depends on what OS you wish to use for your hosting, and the level of control you wish to have to acess your site/ server. i.e. an IIS and ASP driven site with maybe a MSSQL backend datatbase/ shopping cart would need to run on a Windows OS Plan, or you may have your site written in Perl/PHP and prefer use something like MYSQL for the backend and be using Apache say as your web server, so would be better on a Debian/ Redhat linux Plan, if your made of money how about running it on Solaris on the Sun Sparc platform....Again do you wish to interface through an online control panel or have root acess with SSH for Unix based or Remote Desktop aka Term Services acess for windows

anyway enough of the sales pitch as i am not even in sales (I'm a techhie)

But whoever you choose, any advice you need please let us know happy to help out (for a small consultancy fee - only kidding )

Nimbus

Thanks for the comments. I need to look into this a bit more.

Can you recomend a web design product for the novice user (but technically able)... ? Looking to build something strightforward at first, but will need to add databse and on-line ordering (shopping basket) and Credit Card processing at some point.

Thanks

*smiles*

Hi, probably the de-facto product is Dreamweaver by Macromedia , you could off course use Microsofts FrontPage , it just depends basically on your skill level and complexity you wish to go to, what language you choose to write your site in and whether in fact you will use any server side scripting. Again if your site will use static content (html - xhtml) or you will use dynamic content (e.g. ASP and a DB backend). Now more than ever designing a website is so much moer than HTML tags that you could write in notepad, developers are an ever needed skillset, that will needed to provide the functionality behind the layout, pretty buttons and your photoshop images. You will need some level of development/ coding skills to effectively implement a dynamic site, and tying in the backend of a database. You could write your sites code and sell your soul to microsoft by using ASP and learn some SQL/ XML /VBS go a stage furher with any of the .NET languages or go the open source rootand use Perl/ php

You may also want to look @
http://www.oneandone.co.uk
http://order.1and1.co.uk/xml/order/E...op&__lf=Static
http://www.macromedia.com/software/d.../?promoid=BINR
http://www.macromedia.com/resources/web_publishing/
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/office/f.../overview.mspx
http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/as...429391033.aspx

Nimbus

I already have Dreamweaver 3 (I think the latest version is 8?) and created a basic static site, so not a complete novice. But setting up something more complex is probably going to stretch me a little. I may stick to this then to begin with and investigate possibilites when I need to expand it's functions (shopping, payments etc).

I commend you on your sales pitch.

*smiles*

Maybe I should move to sales , I'm a techhie at moment

If the thought of doing it all from scratch and thee thought of it all seems a bit daunting, there are companies that do e-commerce templates for Dreamweaver & front page, it has the majority of the backend DB // shoppoing cart functionality already coded for you, its like a webshop in a box some will give you a control panel which abstracts a lot of the hard coding if you are just starting.

Try these guys http://ecommercetemplates.com ... you need a server to host it on, buts its a nice package that can get you started, and can outgrow it as your knowledge and confidence grows.

http://www.ecommercetemplates.com/overview.asp
http://ecommercetemplates.com/dreamweaverecommerce.asp

There is also a .co.uk of this site as well

many other companies offer this sort of service, i know that one and one do something, but never used this company (but why would I, I work for the opposition )