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My wife is working on building a new website for her startup. She found a landing page template online that she liked and purchased it, which gave her an html file, a css file, and a js file for the landing page. The documentation that came with the template says to upload everything to her FTP, which is a big sticking point because she has zero web design experience outside of automated things like Wordpress and I don't have much more experience than she does. What is a good website hosting service with idiot-proof (or as close to it as possible) FTP built in? I would assume most all of them have FTP capabilities, but the more user-friendly the better. Please ask follow-up questions and I will answer them as best I can; we're in a real blind leading the blind situation over here.
C-Euro fucked around with this message at 18:38 on May 3, 2020 |
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May 3, 2020 18:32
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 14:02 |
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xtal posted:You can use GitHub or GitLab pages and edit the files through the web UI. This would only cost you the domain; the hosting and SSL is free. To put it simply: go to GitHub, make an account, then create a repository called yourusername.github.io. Add the HTML, CSS and JS to the repo (with care to the folder layout.) Then the page will be visible at yourusername.github.io. You can then decide to use a custom domain. Thanks! Being able to edit the files through a web UI would be great, as that's what she's used to with WordPress and the other hosting services she's tried in the past. I looked at Amazon S3 and that's a little too complex for my taste, going to look into GitHub first. As for FTP, that's just the language they used in the documentation. We just need some hosting service that plays nicely with css and js files (which I assume is most to all of them, but in my tired state late last night I couldn't make WordPress do so)
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May 3, 2020 19:19
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So on GitHub, I've figured out how to create a repository and make changes to the files therein, but when I go to open the website created from those files all I see is minimally-formatted text on a webpage with a bunch of broken image links, and no styling other than font sizes and bold (similar to if I just opened index.html from my desktop). My understanding is that all of that info is in the css file that came with the purchase, do I need to set something up to make the index file "see" the css file? They are located in different directories within the repository, could that be it?
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May 3, 2020 20:59
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xtal posted:Inside the HTML file if you search for ".css" you should find a <link> or <style> tag that is pointing to the CSS file. The filename there has to be correct relative to the HTML file. Ditto for the images and so on. It's not important that they be in the same or a different directory, just that it's consistent with the filename in the HTML. Oh jeez that was exactly it, somehow one of us changed the file structure of the whole pack when uploading it to GitHub. Big thanks for the help, now the long process of editing all of that HTML code...
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May 3, 2020 21:43
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Update: Got the landing page up and running on GitHub Pages and styled properly, so now my wife wants to have a custom domain name instead the default github.io domain. Looking at GitHub's documentation of this, it sounds like I need to buy this elsewhere and connect the name to the GitHub repository with the actual site code? GitHub doesn't actually sell custom domains, right?
C-Euro fucked around with this message at 02:16 on May 6, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 02:12
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xtal posted:Correct. Buy your domain from gandi.net or namecheap.com (or anywhere really but those are the most common choices.) That's normally good practice because if a hosting company sells domains too, they probably just resell them from a domain registrar at a markup. Then, put that domain name in a CNAME file, and configure the domain to point to GitHub. It looks like she just bought [companyname].com as an apex domain instead of https://www.[companyname].com, and there's a line in the GitHub help guide about how "An apex domain is configured with an A, ALIAS, or ANAME record through your DNS provider". Should I be doing that instead of a CNAME association?
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May 6, 2020 21:43
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DarkLotus posted:Most DNS providers do not support an ALIAS record for the apex, FYI. Works for me. When I go to add a new A record it has fields to fill in for "Host" and "Points To", the latter of which looks like it needs to be an IP address. Would the domain name that we purchased be the host, and how do I tell which IP address I need to fill in? It looks like there are already a number of A records all with very similar IP addresses filled in, but if I want the domain to go to a GitHub Pages site my first instinct is that I would need an IP address associated with that site, which I don't have.
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May 6, 2020 22:22
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xtal posted:The domain probably comes with some A records already for a parking page or something like that. Records for the apex domain are called @. The IP address they point to are here: https://help.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/managing-a-custom-domain-for-your-github-pages-site Hmmm, I added an A record named @ for each of the four IP addresses listed by GitHub and gave them 1 hour TTLs, while deleting any other A record named @. That was over an hour ago and attempting to load the site says that its server IP address can't be found. On the Settings page for the repository holding the site's code, I'm also seeing "Domain's DNS record could not be retrieved". Do I need to add or remove other DNS records, or does the TTL not actually indicate how long it takes such changes to go into effect?
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May 7, 2020 03:13
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Well I went upstairs to take a shower, came back down and now the site does load at her purchased domain name  Still getting that same error in the repository's settings that the domain's DNS record couldn't be retrieved though. There were a couple of CNAME entries I added to the host's DNS records before I realized those were the wrong type, which I did delete before I stepped away. Maybe that was the difference?https://www.[companyname].com does automatically redirect to the purchased [companyname].com though, I'm not sure if I set that up without knowing or if it was automated somewhere along the way. I'm not entirely sure what I did with all of this but it works, thanks a bunch for your help xtal! ...and now she wants an About page to link from the main landing page  But that's "a weekend project". Gonna force her to give me really clear direction on what she wants before I start figuring out how to make it.
C-Euro fucked around with this message at 04:43 on May 7, 2020 |
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May 7, 2020 04:21
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xtal posted:When you go to the repository settings, that is going to abide by the same TTL and caching rules as your browser, so it may take just as long and behave as unpredictably. Thanks, I think her plan is to just have this landing/sales page that then links visitors to her store and calendar which are hosted elsewhere. She has asked me to put together an About page with this same style though, which I assume would have to be set up within a separate GitHub repository?
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May 11, 2020 02:32
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 14:02 |
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Rufus Ping posted:No, separate html file in the same repository Oh nice. Finally, something easy 
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May 12, 2020 05:59
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