I offer Web hosting services to my clients. People often ask:

What's the difference between domain name registration and Web hosting?

When you register a domain name, you buy the rights to a URL, like www.widgets.com, for a year or two at a time. When it's time to create a website to go with the domain name, you need a space on the Web to store your files, and that's hosting. It's a bit like the difference between registering a business name and renting a storefront or office.

Hosting Fees

If you decide to host your site with me, the cost is $20 a month. This includes unlimited technical support for any hosting issues that may come up, plus frequent software updates for Joomla or WordPress and any extensions or plugins.

Domain Name Registration

I don't register domain names for my clients, but I'm happy to recommend registrars and help walk you through the process. The cost is about $8-$12 a year, depending on what registrar you choose.

I've been using the Joomla! open-source content management system to build websites since 2009. I now use it exclusively, and here's why.

Web 1.0 is long gone

In the olden days, websites were built by writing HTML code, one page at a time, and uploading each page to the Web server. If you needed to make a change, you had to download one page at a time, change the code, and upload it again. If you didn't speak fluent HTML, you had to have special software like Adobe Dreamweaver that cost hundreds of dollars, and even that had a steep learning curve. For websites with dozens or hundreds of pages, it was very unwieldy to make a site-wide change.

Joomla is a CMS

In a nutshell, a content management system (CMS) is the engine that runs most modern websites. It uses a database to keep track of all the text, images, interactive features, and other building blocks of your site, and it assembles all those pieces in any way you choose. This makes your site very flexible and easy to change at will.

Joomla is a happy medium between simplicity and power

The three most popular content management systems today are Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. Drupal is the most powerful, but also the most difficult to use. WordPress has the quickest learning curve, but has fewer advanced features. Joomla strikes a great balance between the two: it's quite easy to learn the basics, but it's still extremely powerful.

There's no need to have special software on your computer

If you're using a Web browser like Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, or Safari right now, you already have all the tools you need. The Joomla software runs on the Web, not on your computer, so you'll just use your regular browser to go to your own site, and log in to make changes.

There's no need to be a nerd

Most of my clients learn the basics of editing their website text, adding images, and creating links in less than an hour! This means you can keep your site up-to-date without having to be a hardcore techie, and without having to pay your "Web guy" just to fix a typo.

Joomla is free and open-source

Those of us who use open-source software like to say, "It's free as in 'free speech' and free as in 'free beer.'" There's no big corporation that owns Joomla - it's freely available for anyone to use, and it's constantly being developed and improved by smart, collaborative people around the world. A price tag of $0 is quite a bargain for some extremely powerful software.

Joomla is extensible

Thousands of extensions are available to plug into Joomla to add functionality. Extensions are to Joomla as apps are to a smartphone. It's easy to install a calendar of events, slideshow, image gallery, email contact form, even a full-fledged shopping cart system - almost anything you can imagine. Best of all, many extensions are free or low-cost.

Your site will be painstakingly hand-crafted by monks. Okay, not really.

After we sign a contract and you give a deposit equal to two hours' work, here's how the process goes:

• Domain name registration (if you don't already have one)
• Web hosting setup
• Joomla! installation, and setup of the categories and pages of the site with placeholder text
• Logo design (optional) and revisions
• Initial site design in Photoshop and revisions
• Image slicing - breaking up the design into individual image files
• Creation of the design template - the basic visual framework that your site design will flow from
• Content addition - plugging in the real content and images that you provide
• Setup of extra features like a slideshow, contact form, image gallery, shopping cart, or anything else you can imagine
• Testing and debugging
• Site launch!

After the site launches, I can always make revisions and additions at my hourly rate. I often make updates for clients for years after their site goes live, and I send a simple monthly bill that's itemized so you can see what you're paying for.

Thanks for your interest! I'm a one-stop shop for Web design, Joomla website development, and hosting. Click the links below to find out more.