UKC

Hi, I'm looking into converting my website www.multipitchclimbing.com into something that doesn't look like it is from the early days of the internet and which is more useful to users.

I was thinking of using wix.com

My site has 1000+ photo's, each "page" is many screens long and is about 2GB.

So, is wix a reasonable choice or is there something better? What worries me is that this is going to take a very long time (the site is a direct web conversion from MS word).

Any thoughts on what to do would be great, as would comments on how to make the material I have a lot more useable for the reader. Thanks.

In reply to David Coley:

if your wiling to spend a bit of money i would buy serif web plus, its easy to use, looks good and it can be converting to HTML exactly that same way as on word!

In reply to David Coley:

I would use a professional web designer and developer. The actual technical skills are not that difficult to learn given a bit of time and effort. It is the design aspect to make your site look more modern and up to date that takes more thought and creative ability and experience.

Yes it will cost, but you could pay for a web designer to mock up some more modern web site ideas and technologies to use. You then put them into reality in your own time learning the skills as you go.

In reply to David Coley:

I would be a big fan of an all-in-one printed book, as I think many consumers don't have a kindle/kobo and would prefer to have everything all in their hands (rather than having to read next to the computer to see the images - which I just about never have the chance to do). Here's one such service where you can print books on demand, in small production runs for a very cost-effective price (although I'm sure there are UK alternatives): http://bookprintondemand.com/
If you were to say collect monies for a print run once a month (initially, until demand tapers off), and then distribute, I'd imagine that'd be fairly cost effective way to get books out to people, although it might cost the individual slightly more - it shouldn't cost you anything other than your time to arrange the file(s) from which the print is done from if you collect money in advance. I'd be happy to pay up to £15-£25 for a book that has all of this.
I don't know how many people would want this if you were to offer it, but you have at least one person interested.

In reply to David Coley:
I used to own and code a website and we did all of our own in house. Assuming you're not selling anything then doing it yourself should be easy to learn. Hosting wise I used to use Koddos as it has defenses against spambots and denial of service attacks as standard. Wix, wordpress and templates from these website creators really didn't work for me and you can get lost in the crowd.
Hire a proper web designer and insist on original content and coding, not some skanky template modifier crap.

In reply to SenzuBean:


What on earth has this got to do website design/hosting?

In reply to David Coley:

I think first you have to make a few decisions about how you want your site to be. Is it going to be a static site (as it looks to be now) or dynamic, like a Wordpress site where users can interact with the site leave comments etc. A dynamic site has obvious advantages but requires regular maintenance, updating, moderation etc.

If you keep it as a static site then you could potentially keep the site as it is and make a few modifications to control the look of the site. A key thing would be to add a stylesheet. This would involve one short line of text added to the header section of each page that links to a small text file. With a good text editor this could be done to all the pages with just one command. Then from that one text file you can control the look of the entire site from layout, colours and fonts etc. Theoretically that could be a really quick and easy way to change the site. However with all those pages I suspect there'd be a lot of other changes you'd probably have to make to individual pages and with hundreds of pages it could end being days or weeks of work.

Having said that though I'm not sure what other options there would be that would be easier. The wix site looks like its designed for making the site from ground up so that would take even longer. You'd have to create each page again. And I'm not sure what sort of software they'd be using.

A big question you need to ask is how easy is it to migrate my site in the future? They may go bust or start charging over the top prices. If they're using some custom made propriety software it might be very difficult, even impossible. If they're using something standard like Wordpress, it will be easier. A static site however will be easiest of all. You just ftp the whole site to its new home. Static hosting usually tends to be cheaper or free, though you can find free hosting for database driven sites (eg. Wordpress). eg. freehostia.com

THe other option is not database driven dynamic sites. These don't require a database but do require a PHP server. These have some of the advantages of both. You can edit pages on the fly through a web browser but if you want to move the site you just download the entire site to your hard drive and re upload it somewhere else. Like Wordpress the look of the site would be controlled through templates. Dokuwiki is a popular example.

Quite a lot to consider. Overall though I think I'd avoid anything like Wix.com. Stick to standardized stuff that can be used anywhere and is well supported.

In reply to David Coley:

As others have said, you need a web designer to help you. But, Tip 1, you must ensure that they give you a site with a content management system so that you can update the content yourself (both text and pictures) as easily as posting to Rocktalk. i.e you pay them to design the site and then a v minimal maintenance charge of a few quid a year, otherwise you could get stung. I'd make sure they use a WordPress template or embed a simple CMS, and then teach you how to use it.

Having designed hand-coded CSS/PHP websites for over a decade, I've now moved over to WordPress because it's just so good. Of course, once you understand some of the rudiments of web design and CSS you can do a lot of tweaking to the WP theme of your choice. Tip 2: Spend a long time looking at different themes before you choose one. I was looking at different ones for over 2 months before committing myself.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


"Any thoughts on what to do would be great, as would comments on how to make the material I have a lot more useable for the reader. Thanks."

Just answering the tail end of David's message.

In reply to SenzuBean:

Well, of course, crosslinks are helpful, but there's no guarantee that they'll help at all. As for having website of your own, that is an obvious and essential necessity, and should really be up and running long before you ever start tweeting.

In reply to David Coley:

I'm in the process of trying to set up a website myself. I find it not a little discouraging that I didn't understand any of what has been posted so far. I think I need a grown up. Or a teenager.

In reply to gribble:

I should mention that the main reason I'm now promoting WordPress, even though I was once (for about a decade) a full-time web designer, is that everything is changing so fast, and any site has to work on multiple formats (iPads, phones, tablets etc). All that used to be v difficult for any designer and became increasingly so. WordPress, of course, handles and updates (or enables you to update) all that for you.

In reply to David Coley:
Just thought I'd say thanks for putting the website together, its a great resource! It would be really cool to see it updated and improved so all that knowledge is more easily accessible.

I'd personally give wordpress a wide birth, its fundamentally a blogging engine which people bolt on countless hacks to make it do what it was never intended for. Despite it being open source many of the plug-ins required to add additional features you might need are normally not free and getting them to play nicely with one another can take a lot of time and involve a lot of learning that is only beneficial for setting up their products. Also with any site that has user input, logins, databases and code running on your server their are security issues, which means keeping on top of maintenance and updates, plus if vulnerabilities are found within plugins that you rely on and the authors don't provide updates your kind of stuffed.

Any way I really like static site generators if you want something that is low maintenance but still has some level of abstraction for dealing with content. you can host it for free from dropbox or similar service by making the directory the compiled website lives in publicly accessible then pointing the domain name at it. You could also use 'github pages' with a static site generator called 'jekyl' and encourage people to make pull requests if they have ways of making things clearer.

There are also a lot of CSS libraries that give very acceptable off the shelf responsive design. Twitter bootstrap being the most well known.

Wiki's are a tried and true method for storing and conveying lots of information, plus they encourage participation rather than just consumption. Not as sexy but might be worth a thought.

The only quick solution for you I can see involves other people, either paying someone who knows what their doing to crack on with it or setting up a wiki and mobilising some volunteers a bit like it was a crag clean up day.

Good luck and keep us posted!

https://pages.github.com/
https://jekyllrb.com/
http://getbootstrap.com/

In reply to David Coley:

Call me old-school, but I found your site easy to use, and easy to navigate. I found that the simple html with in-page tags allowed me to easily directly-link to the part of any page that I wanted to for posting elsewhere as a discussion or data point.

(Also, very helpful and informative.)

In reply to David Coley:

You could just convert the entries in blogposts and setup a blogger account, free to use, easy to use and easy to find using Google for new users.

In reply to /tmp:




This sounds an interesting possibility.

Thanks for input everyone, even if I only understood half of it.