If ever you wanted to learn how to build and manage websites, one of the greatest online resources ever is back, and I only found out a few minutes ago.
For many web designers, Webmonkey.com was our classroom until it got sold off a few years ago, forcing us to either spend money on a library of books we didn’t want, or subscribe to a bunch of less impressive web resources.
But now the guys at CondeNet (who also own the very cool Wired Magazine) have brought the site back into their stable, given it a fresh redesign and begun posting new tutorials. I’ve got this really cheesy grin on my face right now!
If this seems like a totally trivial thing for you, it’s probably because you have absolutely no intention of understanding how the Web works. But for the rest of us this is definitely something worth adding to our feed readers.
While some website owners host their website on their own servers, most will outsource hosting either directly to an ISP (Internet Service Provider) or to their web designer.
Now, if you’re not one of those people who makes a habit of filing information, you probably don’t have a clue about the information you need to access, download or modify your website. So I’ve prepared a short list of the info you’ll need:
- Your domain name – If someone else owns your domain you really should transfer ownership to yourself or your company. You need to take responsibility for annual renewals of your domain yourself to ensure you don’t end up inadvertently letting someone buy your domain name from under you.
- Your hosting company’s name, phone number and email address. The phone number is especially important if your ISP also provides your email hosting.
- Your website’s hosting server.
- Your FTP username and password.
- If you’re running a database, you’ll also need to know the name of the database as well as your database username and password.
- Lastly, I’d highly recommend downloading a copy of your website for backup purposes, because you never know what could happen.
Now you may ask why you need to know this stuff.
- Web designers have a nasty habit of disappearing/going out of business/getting run over by a bus, so you want to know that if anything goes wrong, you haven’t lost all access to your website. Likewise, you may want to hire a new designer or transfer your hosting to another company.
- It’s just good practice.
Hello, I’m Dave. I work with web design agencies, freelancers and bloggers to develop standards-compliant WordPress and Thesis themes.