Anyone out there, have any experience in setting up a website for their Rabbitry?? If so what works? What doesn’t? Free website versus paid. Good domain to use?

There are any number of free website choices out there, some better than others.

If you are looking at paying someone to design and set-up your website, I have to recommend our own MidnightCoder who just happens to be my son, David. He created this website for me. You can see some of his other work at his website: http://www.midnightcoder.ca/

David is a good communicator, both in English and Geek, and his rates are very reasonable. And yes, I know this is a shameless plug from dear old Mom.

At first I started with a free Geocities account, but when I decided to have my own domain name, Rabbitgeek, I paid yahoo for my own site. I'm still with them for $12 month.

I have to code all my own stuff, but that's okay, I know how to do the simple stuff so my website is rather plain. There are other programs you can use to setup a webpage but I rather code it in good old html.

Hee-hee! Imagine that! There is an fashioned way to code a web site!
Sorry. That just looks funny in text.

My website is
http://www.rabbitgeek.com

In the past we had a website for MFO Rabbitry, but when we had problems with County Zoning (livestock/rabbits in a residential zone) they used our website as evidence against us, so be careful what you put online.

But we sold a LOT of rabbits through that website!

Have a good day!
Franco Rios

i like freewebs, but I too am looking into alternatives, there are number of different hosters out there, so it's a matter of looking into them, seeing what you get for what you pay.

My favorite website hosting is http://www.icdsoft.com

I have used them for three or four years now and have never been disappointed. Great prices, top-notch customer service, too. I was referred to them by a full-time graphic designer, so you do have to know how to create a basic website or set-up one with a free template, but you also know it is a host that professionals use themselves.

You could always hire Maggie's son to design the website and have it hosted through ICDSoft. I swear I don't work for the company or anything, I just like it.

Best of luck!

Lauren

Lauren

I have always used webs.com (used to be freewebs.com.) It's free and the websites are easy to set up.

Emily

I like "good old-fashioned" html myself, like rabbitgeek... most of it (and all the stuff you really need) is very simple, and you can make a dynamite website with it. When I first went to rewrite my husband's site (it was originally written by a teenage friend... but he couldn't maintain it anymore once he got grounded!), I looked at using templates that were provided. I hated them because you could do only what the template allowed. I cut my teeth on an Apple IIe, so I don't like for a computer to tell me what to do.

So I found an html tutorial which was wonderfully simple, yet gave you the tools to create a great site, using Notepad. Unfortunately, since AOL Hometown was discontinued, the site has disappeared. You might try a site I just found - http://notepad.com/learn-html.htm -- it makes use of a little tool you download that's supposed to let you see the results of your coding "live". I assume they eventually tell you how to do it for real.

I rewrote and expanded my husband's website, eventually succumbing to the need to learn how to create one menu and have it called by each page, instead of having to change the menu on each page separately -- I was editing 56 individual pages before I finally realized it was time to not be doing that anymore! It's on webs.com (formerly freewebs.com), and we pay something like $15 a year for a boatload of storage and unlimited files and no ads.

Then I wrote a site for a chef friend of ours, who was trying to start his own business. Unfortunately, he fell on really hard times (when he reported to his boss the doings of one of the managers... that's when he found out the manager was in bed with the boss...) and had to move suddenly, and I haven't heard from him in a long time. His site is on 110mb.com, which I like a lot and don't pay a thing for. The only thing I don't like about it is the clunkiness of the site name, 110mb. It doesn't exactly roll easily off the tongue in a way that is easy for another person to pick up the first time. Oh, well.

If you want to see some of the stuff you can do with html, have a look at rabbitgeek's site, and maybe my husband's site http://shaygetz.webs.com/ (yes, I know I haven't updated it in a long time) and my chef friend's site http://chefkeith.110mb.com/. If you're on dial-up, definitely do not go to Chef Keith's site. But if you know where he is now, please tell him to call, so I can find out how the kids are.

Oh -- and please do everyone a favor and avoid using frames...

Paid domains to me look more professional vs a free site that will have ads and pop ups. I find it's a huge turn off when I'm trying to look at a rabbit site and I keep getting distracted with ads about my credit score.

For my website I have a paid domain, and I use Microsoft FrontPage to update it and I can switch in between the simple design part, html, and even a split screen where you can use html and see what you're doing at the same time. The original domain name cost was $25.00, and I pay $8.33 a month for the hosting (through my dad's business).

any reccomendaitons on a paid type website that doesent cost an arm and a leg and is something, that is fairly easy to setup and maintain.

Yes... ICDSoft.com- it is $6/month. No ads, professional, reasonable, reliable.

Here are some free html layouts I found through a 30 second google search: http://www.freelayouts.com/websites/html-templates

You might also be able to find someone through CL or something that you can work out a barter with- bunnies for website design?

Best of luck,

Lauren

110mb.com doesn't put ads or pop-ups on your site, and they're free. Or you can host your own domain name with them, which isn't free. Their reliability seems to be great, nice and stable, and they have a support forum for the free sites.

The free sites are paid for by the non-free sites as well as an ad page that displays in place of the dreaded "error 404" when someone mistypes your site. They also don't support MySQL and other things like that which take a lot of server space on the free sites. So you can't host a forum on a free site, for instance. So they keep their costs on the free sites down by supporting only basic services for free sites. Which is plenty enough to put up a very nice site.

It's nice, too, that the free sites get a yoursitename(.)110mb(.)com name, rather than www(.)110mb(.)com/yoursitename.

Haha... had to defeat the auto-linking feature!

I am too cheap to pay someone to do my website. It would be better if I could, but I enjoy updating and what not. I would rather pay someone to take pictures - I AM HORRIBLE. My rabbits are much, much nicer in person.

Anyway, I do not like free sites. I currently use a free site (freewebs) for my rattery. http://allearsrattery.webs.com/index.htm I do not have rats yet (have them reserved but pick up isn't until May 15).

I pay for my rabbitry website through yahoo - $35 ish every 3 months, so $140 a year. Expensive yes, but super easy to use. www.allearsrabbitry.com

I also do a website for the Kern County RBA. http://kerncorba.weebly.com/
As you see, they go through weebly but do not have their own domain name. The cost is $27.49 every 6 months, so about $55 a year. Very easy to use as well, I'm just a yahoo girl - lol. You can also keep a blog through the website =)

I also keep a blog that covers all my animals (I have my own mini zoo) lol. It's free =) http://allearsrabbitry.blogspot.com/

Good luck! =)

http://www.siteground.com/ $3.95 a month
FREE Domain Name ($14.95 value)
Install Joomla free
reasonable joomla templates just $29!!http://www.pixelpointcreative.com/templates/commercial-templates.html and help is excellent!!

there is also edatarack - cheapest around @ $2.95 a month for hosting but not as reliable. http://www.edatarack.com/

I use ucoz.com It's a decent site except the templates are kind of rigid, but it's all the time I have to dedicate to it. It has html and wysiwyg editors, and a host of other add ons, like forums, games, photo albums.

The domain hosting is through godaddy.com