Website is launched....

The Learning Anorak website has gone live... at last!

I finally managed to talk to the right people about the right things. It wasn't easy. I had to preface each conversation with, "You're talking to a bit of a numpty, here..." to make sure the person on the other end of the line kept the jargon to a minimum. I also had to ask them to tell me what questions I should be asking before going on to give me the answers. Some people were great. Some were downright rude. Some were rather superior. One got annoyed with me because "You're not actually a numpty at all. We've wasted a lot of time here!" I took that as a compliment.

So just in case you're thinking of setting up your own website (and on the off-chance that you're a partial numpty, too, when it comes to such things), this is the process I went through:

I bought the domain learninganorak.co.uk through 123-reg. This bit was easy and quite cheap. 123-reg also has some free tools for creating a website. I had a go with those, but they were quite restrictive. I'm sure if I were more proficient with html, I would have fared better, but I ended up with something I was really not happy with.

Then Mark Berthelemy suggested Vistaprint for free business cards. They really are free (excluding P&P) for the first 250... with some limitations. I also discovered that they do all sorts of other free things (on Saturday, I became the proud owner - in addition to my business cards - of some mail return labels, a pen and a T-shirt), including website design tools. They offer reasonably-priced web-hosting, too. Using their design tools, I came up with a site I was far happier with. The only problem is, when I published it, it came up with a different URL, which included an indication of the hosting organisation.

The meant that a person entering learninganorak.co.uk into their address bar would find themselves at a 123-reg page advising them that one of their clients had bought the domain. Not very helpful to me... or presumably to this hypothetical person who might be trying to track me down with an offer of business.

I fiddled about a bit, trying to redirect things myself... and failed. In the end, what I had to do was to get the nameserver details of the (Vistaprint) hosting server across to 123-reg and ask them to point the domain name there. 123-reg's online form for this process includes a field asking for a piece of information that I thought was the IP address, which I also had. This turned out not to be what was required and I phoned them in a state of confusion. The woman I spoke to assured me that the nameserver was enough information and that I would find that my request had been action within 48 hours.

I was doubtful, but it turned out that she was right.

So now I have a website. Please swing by and let me have your input - bearing in mind that this is my first go at it... oh, and I'm a bit of a numpty ;o)