Sunday, December 23, 2012

New Web Site

I have a new website.  I posted it last weekend and then spent five days getting the email working again.  Now it appears that everything is fully up and running and I'm pretty excited about it.

I started working on the new site months ago while I was still in Afghanistan.  The old site looked okay but was a pain in the keister to update.  The reason was that it was all done in basic html code, which required me to write every bit of coding by hand.  My friend Genie Maples told me about Weebly.com, which is a web hosting site that has a lot of pre-built templates and drag-and-drop features.  I tried messing with it and it was much easier to put pages together, change them around, add pictures, and delete stuff.  So after returning home from Afghanistan, I got serious about building a new site.  It was finished and launched last weekend.

But then came troubles with email.  When I moved the site from my previous location (WestHost) to Weebly, the associated email died.  I was on the online chat every day with the WestHost support techs trying to get everything straightened out.  The problem was that I got the domain name (skiprohde.com) through WestHost, and that meant that the email needed to stay there as well.  But the actual site was hosted at Weebly.  So some of the settings needed to point to Weebly and some to WestHost.  And to say they were very particular is an understatement.

Have you ever dealt with tech support guys?  I've always found them to be friendly, smart, over-worked, and generally dismissive of every other tech support guy's approach.  Every one of 'em knows a better way of doing things, and when you tell him what the last guy told you to do, he'll just smirk and go off in a different direction.  WestHost's tech support was pretty good, but I talked with six guys over six days and each one of them took a slightly different approach.  But, finally, one of them took the bull by the horns, went into my site, and changed the settings himself.  And got the email working.

So now everything is fully operational.  I'd appreciate it if you would take a look, bang on buttons, test the email, Facebook, and LinkedIn connections, and let me know what you think.

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