Geeklog Site

Ready Made Web Sites!

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:27:00 -0600

You can build your own website if you have a little patience, and the ability to learn simple computer skills. Some of the best web hosts offer easy install of some of the best free source CMS (Content Management Systems) on the web. A CMS is much more sophisticated than having a simple website. They are designed with a database which store information to be recalled on other parts of your website. Forums are a popular use of data bases. They store member names, posts, join dates, etc.

Flexibility in choice for your web site is important. Pick a web host who offers a large variety of easy to install website templates AND offers the latest and greatest Content Management Systems, Blog sites, Forum (Discussion Boards) sites, Customer Relationship sites, E-Commerce sites, ready made web site templates and more. All of which are easily installed through the web hosting control panel.

My Web Host currently offers the following FREE (with hosting package) and easy to install web site statagies:

Blogs

b2evolution
Short description: A blog script featuring multiple blogs, categories/sub-categories, skins, search function, multiple languages, search engines friendly URLs.
Nucleus
Short description: A powerful blog script featuring multiple blogs, multiple authors, drafts and future posts, bookmarklets.
WordPress
Short description: WordPress is a personal publishing tool with focus on aesthetics and featuring cross-blog tool, password protected posts, importing, typographical niceties, multiple authors, bookmarklets.

Content Management

Drupal
Short description: An advanced portal with collaborative book, search engines friendly URLs, online help, roles, full content search, site watching, threaded comments, version control, blogging, news aggregator.
Geeklog
Short description: A portal system with a wide range of modules. Used to create CattyShaq.com
Joomla 1.5
Short description: Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable.
Joomla
Short description: Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable.
Mambo Open Source
Short description: A professional level yet easy to use Content Management System featuring inline WYSIWYG content editors, newsfeeds, syndicated news, banners, mailing users, links manager, statistics, content archiving, date based content, 20 languages, modules and components.
PHP-Nuke
Short description: One of the most popular community-based portals with a big choice of modules and languages.
phpWCMS
Short description: phpWCMS is perfect for professional, public and private users. It is very easy to learn and gives you the flexibility to separate layout and content. Lots of powerful but simple implemented features assists publishers and web developers too.
phpWebSite
Short description: Very powerful Content Management System with document manager, announcements, menu manager, photo album, block maker, FAQ, web pages maker, polls, information categorizer, calendar, link manager, form generator.
Post-Nuke
Short description: A Content Management System with focus on flexibility and security. A big variety of modules and blocks makes this CMS an allround tool.
Siteframe
Short description: A straightforward content-management system designed for rapid deployment of community-based websites. Nice-looking templates, oriented toward document-sharing, clean interface.
Xoops
Short description: A very popular advanced portal system.

Customer Relationship

Crafty Syntax Live Help
Short description: A Live Help chat system featuring monitor your visitors, proactively open a chat session, multiple chat sessions, referer tracking, page view tracking, multiple operators, canned responses/images/URLs, multiple departments each with different icons, leave a message.
Help Center Live
Short description: Very powerful all-in-one help center including Live Help, Support Tickets and FAQ. Features include unlimited operators/departments, monitor visitors, initiate chat, collect visitor's information, track visitor's footprint, autosave chat transcripts, canned messages, leave a message, auto-assign tickets to operators, unlimited FAQ topics.
osTicket

Short description: A Support Tickets system featuring email piping, pop3 login, unlimited email addresses, admin/staff/user panels, avoid autoresponder loops, limit maximun tickets user can have opened, accept attachments and limit size, pager alerts for admin.
PHP Support Tickets
Short description: A simple, one-admin Support Tickets system featuring self-registering, emailing to admin, attachments.
Support Services Manager
Short description: Visit site for more information.

Discussion Boards

phpBB
Short description: A widely-popular open-source bulletin-board package, works well, simple user interface and admin panel, clean look, scales well, and can be customized.
SMF
Short description: Elegant. Effective. Powerful. Free. SMF is all of the above. SMF is a next-generation community software package and is jam-packed with features, while at the same time having a minimal impact on resources.

E-Commerce

CubeCart
Short description: An easy to use yet powerful shopping cart featuring unlimited categories and products, multiple payment gateways, downloadable products. The design is very easy to modify.
OS Commerce
Short description: A power-user shopping cart with a big variety of modules and support of almost every payment gateway. A big developers community is ready to offer custom solutions depending on your needs.
Zen Cart
Short description: Zen Cart truly is the art of e-commerce; a free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart system. The software is being developed by group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think e-commerce could be and should be done differently.

F.A.Q.

FAQMasterFlex
Short description: Unlimited categories/questions/answers, web-based administration.

Hosting Billing

AccountLab Plus
Short description: AccountLab can lookup over 180 TLD's, have unlimited hosting plans, offer monthly, quarterly, six monthly and yearly payment options, handle tax. AccountLab works with PayPal, WorldPay (FuturePay), NoChex, 2checkout and offline payments such as checks or bank transfer.
phpCOIN
Short description: A full billing/invoicing application, perfect for webhosting resellers.

Image Galleries

4Images Gallery
Short description: An Image Gallery system featuring unlimited categories/subcategories, web-based and FTP images upload, auto-thumbnails, comments, send a picture, rate a picture, random pictures, extensive administration panel.
Coppermine Photo Gallery
Short description: An Image Gallery system featuring categories and albums, thumbnails and intermediate size pics, search feature, new and random pictures, user management (private galleries, groups), user comments, e-cards feature, slideshow viewer.
Gallery
Short description: An Image Gallery system featuring albums within albums, thumbnailing specific picture area, captions, rotate, reorder pictures, album-based attributes, album mirroring.

Polls and Surveys

Advanced Poll
Short description: A highly windows-inspired poll script.
LimeSurvey
Short description: LimeSurvey (formerly PHPSurveyor) is an open source online survey application. It enables users to develop, publish and collect responses to surveys. Surveys can include branching, custom preferred layout and design (using a web template system), and can provide basic statistical analysis of survey results. Surveys can be public, or can be strictly controlled through the use of "once-only" tokens for each survey participant.
phpESP
Short description: PhpESP is an effective, capable, web-based survey application that enables businesses to create complex and advanced surveys, view results in real time, and carry out advanced analysis.

Project Management

PHProjekt
Short description: Project Management featuring optional group system, privileges, calendar, contacts, time card, projects, chat, forum, request tracker, mail client, files, notes, bookmarks, to-do list, reminder, voting, language support.

Site Builders

Templates Express
Short description: Use Templates Express to install static templates to your website. You will need to use FTP and edit the html files, replacing the default text with your own text. Standard information like title, name, address and similar will be collected during installation and placed into the installed template in the appropriate locations.

Wiki

TikiWiki
Short description: TikiWiki is designed to be an international, clean and extensible Content Management System and Groupware that can be used to create all sorts of web applications, sites, portals, intranets and extranets. TikiWiki also works great as a web-based collaboration tool. TikiWiki has a lot of native options and sections that you can enable/disable as you need them.
PhpWiki
Short description: PhpWiki is a web site where anyone can edit the pages through an HTML form. Linking is done automatically on the server side; all pages are stored in a database.

Other Scripts

Moodle
Short description: A course management system designed to help educators create quality online courses. Available in 34 languages and features a WYSIWYG HTML editor. The teacher has full control over all settings for a course. There is a flexible array of course activities (Forums, Journals, Quizzes, Resources, Choices, Surveys, Assignments, Chats, Workshops), user logging and tracking, mail integration and much more.
Open-Realty
Short description: Real Estate listing system featuring attachments, flexible search, template system, Yahoo Maps interface.
phpAdsNew
Short description: A highly professional complete ad server featuring different types of ads, display based on keywords, zones, hour of the day, day of the week, extensive statistics, client statistics.
phpFormGenerator
Short description: A form generator featuring up to 100 form fields, all kind of input fields incl. file upload, customizable fields attributes, send submitted data to an email address or store them in a database, admin panel.
WebCalendar
Short description: A very powerful webcalendar featuring private and public calendars.

Finding a Good Domain Name

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 11:11:58 -0600

Finding a good domain name that isn't already in use, can be a nightmare. Established offline businesses might find it particularly hard to find a name relevant to their company name unless it's very unique.

So what do you do when your perfect domain is already in use? You find a way to add to the domain name and still make it relevant. For example; if you own Dave's Dinner on the beach in California, you may find davesdinner.com has already been taken. Try to add to the domain until you come up with something fitting...like DavesDinnerOnTheBeach.com or maybe DavesDinnerCali.com TLD (top level domains) are important to own if you are to rely on someone typing in the URL (web address/domain name) to reach your site. The top domain is a .com address followed by .net then .org. When at all possible get the .com domain since most people forget .net or .org because habit makes people end a domain name with .com without thinking about it.

If your business will mostly exist online, and the domain name doesn't have to be restrictive, you can get more creative.

When picking your domain name keep in mind that using important key words WITHIN the domain name will help your site rank higher in search engines. So if you make and sell custom jewelry, it would serve you well to have both 'custom' and 'jewelry' in your domain name. At a minimum, you should have 'jewelry' in the domain name. For example if someone typed in 'custom jewelry' in a search engine, a site named DeesCustomJewelry.com would rank higher in the returned results than DeesJewelry.com and would bury a site named dees.com 100 pages back in the search results.

Most web hosting packages offer one free domain name with the package. Some also allow you to host several domains on one account, but you will have to purchase the other domain names yourself.

Through experience I've learned it may not be a good idea to host your domain names with your web host because they may become possessive over the domain name, and charge you a fee to move it to another host, should you decide (or be forced) to move to another host. Your free domain name will be the only one with domain email, so if you plan to add other domains, use the most generic choice when opening your web hosting account. That way you can set up email accounts for your other sites within the same email account. For example; your main account could be example.com and you could add email addresses like site2@example.com, site3@example.com and so on.

The best place I've seen to help you in your search for an available and relevant domain name is http://www.nameboy.com/ It's like a domain name super store. There is a name spinner where you put in key words and the spinner returns available domain names based on your criteria. I host all of my domain names at Nameboy.com. If I move to another webhost, I simply login to my account and change the DNS (domain name server) info to point to the new web host's server. While it may sound complicated, it's as simple as correcting your address on an online form.

The owner of Nameboy.com also negotiates the sale of domain names. So if you are willing to pay for a domain name that you really like, contact the owner to see if he can help.

Some domain names are taken, but they are just sitting idle waiting for someone to pay a little more for a domain name that's relevant to their business.

Do you need a small business website for little money?

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:30:48 -0600

Welcome to Catty Shaq! I want you to know that having your own website isn't nearly as complicated as you might think. In fact, it's downright easy! And even more important, I want you to know that you can have a quality website for less than $100 a year! That includes EVERYTHING! The hosting, the domain name and even a pretty terrific ready made site that you just have to edit with your own info.

If you have a small business and need a website just to bring your business into the 21st century, you've come to the right place. You can have a quality website where you can provide information for your customers, and potential customers. Even if your company is as simple as a Notary service, you would be smart to have a site where people can find you when they need you.Web Hosting made easy for Small Business - $6.95/mo!

Of course websites aren't only for businesses. They can be a great source of entertainment, or a fun way to learn. For less than $100 a year, you can have your own website, with plenty of room for growth.

You can even host several websites on the same hosting account. The only extra expense is the extra domain names (usually under $15 a year).

So if you want to build a great website with little money, you've come to the right place. The key is finding the best web hosts and understanding what they offer. One of the biggest mistakes that you can make when picking a web host is to pick a cheap host and then paying extra for the things you need to operate the site. The cheap becomes expensive...and complicated.

Catty Shaq's #1 choice in webhosting for Reliable, Affordable Personal or Business Hosting that has the tools to help even the newbie get started. Yet they offer large storage and transfer limits for larger sites. Click here for Catty Shaq's hosting choice.