Web sites and web hosting

[Manx203]

How many of you have personal/delartment web sites?
How much are you paying for hosting?
Do you design the site yourself or have someone else do it?

[nmfire]

3gb of storage. 5gb of bandwidth. 20 email addresses. Unlimited SQL databases and a bunch of other fancy little features. It costs us $6/mo. The domain registration is what, $12 every few years or so. I designed it myself.

[LeeJunkins]

3gb of storage. 5gb of bandwidth. 20 email addresses. Unlimited SQL databases and a bunch of other fancy little features. It costs us $6/mo. The domain registration is what, $12 every few years or so. I designed it myself.

Who is it with, I have designed mine too, on Tripod, I have already got my domain name too, but I haven't got a server yet. I am just learning the hard way how to do all of this.

[nozzelvfd]

Two departments in my area use http://www.firehousesolutions.com/ for there web site and hosting. Both sites are awsome too!!!

[captain407]

our department is lucky in that we have a member that does alot of web stuff and he owns a server, so he designed it for free and put it on his server it should be up and running in the next few weeks. It will be highriverfire.ca if anyone wants to check it out.

[nfdrnt]

With FrontPage or DreamWeaver (site software) and a little patience, you can put together pretty good sites on your own. www.sig10.org and www.nassauFDrant.com are a couple of mine.

[FlyingKiwi]

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THANKS
WEBTEAM

[Weruj1]

www.acesstoledo.com I think .........and we pay around 600/yr ..I think .........and I do the updating myself.

[WebFire]

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WEBTEAM

[nmfire]

I use http://www.hostgator.com

[FireCritic]

We used to use UsWare, however I experienced poor customer service. So we switched to www.profirefighter.com . I am the webmaster of our Local's site www.local1132.org.
I also have a blog which I use www.blogger.com which you can view herewww.roanokefirefighters.blogsp ot.com . Blogger is free.

This is my opinion and I am not promoting my own company(s).

[NonSurfinCaFF]

Can't help you with a server but to do your own site isn't that hard, Windows comes with a cheap version of Front Page (Front Page Express) and the full version is usually included with Word, Excel, & Power Point in a pack which most people seem to have. Go take a couple hour Front Page class from CompUSA or similar store (usually about $50) and after some practice you should be ready to do it yourself. You could also probably talk a professor from a community college into loaning you a student to do it, I'm sure many students would jump at the chance to add to their beginning web design resume with a FD website.

I've heard Dreamweaver is a better program than Front Page but it doesn't have the ease of access Microsoft has. I'm pretty sure you could find a copy of Front Page on a department members computer, you would probably have to buy Dreamweaver.

For a server you can get a huge list from google, there are also quite a few sites that rate servers.

[WillGriffin1]

I'm paying $100/yr. hosting with a ton of features and $12/yr. registration. I've got chat rooms, forums, multiple mail boxes, mailing lists, unlimited SQL, etc.

I'm using MS FrontPage as part of my MSOffice Suite as my authoring tool and I have the FP extensions installed at the server end, which gives me on-line forms, etc. This is pretty easy to use and you can add a lot of functions and RSS news feeds really easy with it. I'm also interfacing the web sites with the other elements of the MS Office Suite.

Still, you need to know a little html, java, etc. to really do things, but this is true for just about every authoring tool. None of these authoring tools helps you with your META tags, search engine submissions, search engine rankings, or other things that you really need to do to drive traffic to your web site. Herein is another important consideration. Knowing how market and drive traffic effectively, is as important as knowing how to create a nice web site. You can have a great web site, but if you don't have visitor traffic . . .

I've got one site I've still got under preliminary development for http://PioneerHose.com where I'm just waitng now for the company to give me their history, officers, members, scene photos and a time for me to take photos of their apparatus. I'll then do some of the final appearance things, add the RSS news feeds, etc.

I've also got http://VFD-Funding.com and you can see I've a ton of pages, space, features and functions all for $100/yr. but I'm pretty much doing my own server admin. too. Here again, I've got a lot of space features, functions, RSS news feeds, chat rooms, forums, an employment section, sever on-line forms that send results to the various e-mail addresses, etc.

If you take a look at these sites, this will pretty much show some of the things you can do with FrontPage. For most departments creating and editing their own web sites, FP is pretty much one of the best tools available, because it is pretty easy to use, pretty easy to learn, has plenty of built-in help, and you can do much quickly with it. Still, plan to spend a lot of time creating/developing your web site and marketing it, unless you can get someone else to do it for you.

Will Griffin

[FireCritic]

I use dreamweaver, and am contemplating the $200 upgrade to the current version dreamweaver 8.

I will say one more thing about the server I use, www.profirefighter.com , they offer what appears to be a turnkey web design for FD sites. It is called Union Active. It seems to be pretty decent. Personally I had more fun developing my own site.

[SSTONER]

I currently use Hostgator.com for hosting, I also use to design full time for a living - One thing I would encourage anyone who updates, and or designs thier organizations sites, is to take a class in Photoshop. Dreamweaver is great and I use it myself, however, it is only part of the ingredients in making a site.

A few lessons in photoshop can help make a professional looking site that can updated very easily (graphically) in Dreamweaver. Photoshop has a very nice export feature that works great with Dreamweaver.

WebmasterWorld.com(I think thats right) is also a great site to learn about setting your sites HTML properly and also has a lot of info that webmasters may be intersted in.

If you do choose to use an outside designer remember to ask for references ans ask to see sites they have designed. Cost can vary from a few hundred to the thousands of dollars to have a site designed so looking at thier work can be very important.

And always make back ups of your sites after an update and save those updates on a CD that you keep.

[DobermanXXL]

I designed www.firenetwork.net

I don't update it anymore, it's too time consuming.

I use addr.com

[mccooliscool]

You can create and host a website for about $100.00 per year

Easy to use and navigate

go to www.12qa.com for details

Go to the firehouses in brooklyn I created these in about 10 minutes