Andrews Family

We started a web page when Jenny was pregnant with Oliva to share news and updates with family. Then we were using the free web space provided by our Internet Service Provider (ISP). But the space went quickly after she was born and we wanted to post more pictures. So we started investigating web hosts and asking our friends for recommendations. We ended up registering this domain (www.drozmonkey.com) at www.8-95.com. Not only did they register our domain for 1 year for $15, but with a new domain they also provide free web hosting. It is 20 MB of space and you can check out all the details, but that’s what we’ve been using and it has been great. We’ll probably upgrade to one of their paid plans shortly just to get more space for pictures, but it was really nice to be able to get the domain name and ‘test drive’ the web host. 8-95’s motto of “web hosting when you don’t need your hands held or your forehead patted” was a little daunting, but I wouldn’t let that scare you off. I think you would be on your own with most web hosts and your best resources would be the web and friends. So if you are looking to get your own web pages started we’ve had a good experience with 8-95.com and figured we’d pass it along.

So how do we run our website? Well the core of our website is WordPress, which is an open source (free) software package for blogging. There are a lot of benefits to it and similar packages versus traditional web site development. In traditional website development you create the web pages on your computer using software like Microsoft Front Page, and then upload them to the site. So there can be a lot of maintenance involved if you want your website to change frequently. With WordPress, it uses Themes which makes all the pages looks similar and you can download lots of different themes. In our case we started with a theme and then modified to our taste. The next thing is that to add content to our webpage, we just log in. Once logged in, there is an administrative interface page which lets us manage our web site from our website. So if we want to add a post, we just log in and start typing. WordPress also supports plug-ins to add extra functionality. For example, we use Contact Form ][ (WP-2.0.x) for our contact page, WeatherIcon for the weather on the sidebar of the main page, and ChenPress (although setting up a WYSIWYG editor isn’t always easy). The biggest thing is that we now spend our time sharing our information, rather than learning how to design and publish web pages. But if you are into that kind of thing you can get your hands dirty with WordPress, themes, and plug-ins too! So Jenny and I can both be happy using it.

If you’ve got a favorite theme, plug-in, or WordPress hack let us know!