The Plan and Finding a Site Host

I am really pleased to post another ‘episode’ from Wayne on his experiences on establishing his site:

Hello again! It’s Wayne with another offering of the wonderful experience of hosting a website and podcast. I left off last week with the desire to give back to our community in the only way I am experienced at. Computers. Sure, I could have taught a class or two at the library or the adult education services at the high school, but I’m not a great orator. So the plan is a website.

Here’s what I was thinking. A website that shows, in one place, all the things a small village or town can offer, from schedules to recreational activities. Right now, if you wanted to know when the 5th graders basketball sign-ups are, you would need to call the town hall. If you wanted to know when the Varsity baseball team was playing, who and when, you would have to call the school.

We have a small local paper called The Message that comes out once a week. It covers a large area of Southern Vermont, so our town of Chester gets about 3 to 5 pages, many of it covering letters to the editor, advertisements, and stories on what has happened. It occasionally has schedules of things in advance, but that is mostly either theater productions or perhaps who will be visiting the local bookstore. We don’t have a radio station or any other communications strictly about Chester, except for the government website, the school websites, and the travel website. All good sites, and if you wanted to visit Chester and want to know which Bed and Breakfast to stay at or what the school minutes at the last meeting was, these are all sites that you would go to.

So here’s the plan. I’m creating a site with schedules. For the town recreation league, the school sports, and concerts and activities. Maybe I’ll throw in some local business happenings, if there happens to be any of note.

So what should I use? RapidWeaver? Maybe. But before doing anything, I went to goDaddy to register a domain name. A simple, relatively painless process that took a lot less time and trouble than I thought it was going to. The one thing that I had trouble deciding was whether to make my information “private�? or not, as that costs extra. Since this isn’t a business, but a private venture, I decided to go ahead and make it private. I’ve heard iffy things about goDaddy as an actual hosting site, so I decided not to use them in that regards. A friend had suggested another hosting site, which I finally went with. I let him handle the changing of the domain name and he put up WordPress for me.

Now I hadn’t thought about going the blog route. My original plans where for a real website. The more I started playing around in WordPress, the more powerful it became. Same friend suggested a book titled Publish and Prosper: Blogging for your Business. I purchased and read the book, and found it enlightening to say the least, and would suggest it if anyone asked. It kind of flips back and forth, I think, between blogging for blogging sake, and tidbits with business and how it could help a company. A little hard to explain, really, but a good read.

So now I was enamored with WordPress, but I still wanted to try podcasting along side of blogging. This is where I start to run into a little difficulty. Though WordPress says it will automatically enclose your mp3 file, it still needs a little work. What also needs a little work is understanding WordPress, how it deals with your domain name, and where you need to store your audio files where it can find them. So we tried using a program called LoudBlog. It worked terrific with podcasts, but not so hot in the blogging options. Back to WordPress, which is where it stands now. I couldn’t ask for a better site as it looks and acts exactly how I imagined it being so. Stay tuned next time to learn exactly how I had to post my mp3s, enclose them to be “podcastable,�? and have the site and everyone else be able to find and play them.

Why not pop over to Wayne’s site and see how he is doing for yourself?