Become a web developer in an evening

It seemed like a logical step to purchase dedicated hosting for the new Smarter companies (SmarterHousing is hosted by Atelier Studios) and, despite finishing work around 9 p.m., I decided to do so this evening.

Obtaining hosting was easy enough - coming in at a very respectable £15 per month for a package which should see me through the next 12 months at least. Unfortunately, the next step wasn’t quite as simple as uploading my existing files onto my new webspace and any efforts to do so were greeting with an “authorisation failed” message.

(By trial and error) I created an ftp server for my dedicated hosting and after some on the go learning about A-records and name servers I managed to get www.smarterhotels.co.uk to point to the new, rather than old, location of files for the website. I was now able to upload my html files to the new hosting - phew!

Rather than just copy and paste onto the new hosting, I thought I would try and come up with a SmarterHotels logo…. usually left to the web guys, however they are (or should be) fast asleep. Given I’ve never used photoshop before, I’m fairly pleased with myself…

The starting point…

The finished product…

With that out the way, I thought I’d look into tidying up the layout a little. Although the initial directory is going to be given the SmarterHousing look and feel early in 2009, it can’t hurt to touch up the basic html site.

Since I’m using Kompozer I did a quick search for “example Kompozer sites” and found some easy how-to guides on the Mozilla site. I now have a tabulated html page, rather than a messy dumping ground for text :0)

Posted by Adam Arnold