My Own Web Page...

...is a thing that I have been thinking about getting lately to help facilitate an extension/growth to my hobby of keeping and breeding reptiles and amphibians. Actually I am planning on starting up a small scale business selling reptiles and amphibians at shows and possibly via the Internet. So with that in mind earlier, I went ahead an ordered 2 years of website hosting from StartLogic.com. Then this afternoon, and tonight I sat down, with a lot of time to kill, and tried to figure out how to make it work to design and create my website. After a few hours of getting frustrated by their website development tool, I called their 24/7 live help line. Over 53 minutes waiting for tech service to take my call, then I spoke to the techie for about 2 or 3 seconds and the line went dead, I am pretty sure on the other end. So I called back, and pressed whatever number for sales. The wait for someone in sales was shorter, only about 25 minutes. I got a friendly guy who almost did what I asked, which was to cancel my account and give me my money back as per their 30 day no questions asked guarantee. He said he put a note in the system for someone to do that tomorrow. Oh well, one can only hope it will get done.

What to do now. Well I guess I can ask - anyone out there know of a good web hosting site that has an easy to use, and extensive, web design program included. If so, let me know. If no one speaks up, I'll have to pick up a web design program and design it myself. I was thinking off MS FrontPage 2003. I would much rather avoid that expense by finding a company that offers easy to use website building software with their web hosting. If it was even only half as easy as it is to use Easy Designer (AOL's choice for web design to build your AOL homepage), or half as easy as using Blogger as I do for this blog, then it would be a snap. I don't know if there is something like that out there, but I imagine there must be if AOL and Blogger can make it as easy as they do - and they both let people sue it for free!

Of course I could make up a site here on Blogger, but I would rather have my own domain name. I had one for several hours today, and now it is in limbo because the company retained rights to it since I got my money back. I think I can pay them $6.50 to register it in my name for a year, and I'll have to look into that if I go with a different web hosting company. If I go back to StartLogic, it is my understanding they will give me that domain name back. First though, I want to make sure I can get what I consider easy to use, fairly full featured, website building software. Then I'll build my site. Then I'll have someone host it.

Now mind you, I am not saying that there was anything wrong with StartLogic, well except for how long it takes their service people to answer the telephone. Besides that it was just that I did not understand how to use the darned site building software - and I must point out there was no tutorial on it that I could find, and then having to wait that long and be disconnected was a major bummer. One othe rthing was that it looked as if you had to build from a template, and the choices were not to my liking. A personal thing regarding my tatses, not their wrong doing. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

All the best,
Glenn B