Web Concepts

Lunarpages wants to help you develop a better digital marketing strategy for your online business or web site, today. With the Lunarpages Online Marketing Services, developed in partnership with digital advertising agency LocalDirective you will soon be on the road to web site success.

All you do is pick the one of the three tiers of service you need, and best serves your budget.  These new marketing add-on services will help with everything from search engine marketing, social media, e-mail marketing, search engine optimization and more.  We are also offering this new service to Lunarpages clients for a fraction of the price that the other guys charge.

Introductory Online Marketing Package = Only $149

Get started with the development of your online presence with this introductory package, which provides:

• Facebook & MySpace Coupons Redemption
• Search Engine Optimization
  • A customized Search Engine Ranking Report
  • Custom Meta Data (title, description & keywords)
  • A customized Keyword Density report
• Search Engine Marketing Guide
• Business Directory Listings

Basic Online Marketing Package = Only $389

Ratchet your online presence up to a higher level with our basic package, which provides:

• Google, Yahoo or Bing: $50 Pay-Per-Click Campaign
• Facebook & MySpace Coupons Redemption
• Search Engine Marketing Guide
• Business Directory Listings
• Search Engine Optimization Website Effectiveness
  • Custom Meta Data (title, description & keywords)
  • A customized Keyword Density report
• Search Engine Optimization – Link-Building Articles
• Search Engine Optimization – Ranking & Competitor Comparison
• Search Engine Analytics

Custom Online Marketing Package = Try Out Our Online Marketing Calculator!

Just answer a few simple questions and our online marketing calculator will recommend the best marketing program for your needs.

Ultimately, the most effective search engine marketing program will be an ongoing program that is custom to your business, developed just for your target audience, and that takes your unique circumstances and competitors into consideration.

For many businesses, your online presence will definitely determine your future.  Use our custom calculator to determine the best option for you, depending on seven different marketing variables.

Want to Accelerate Your Business Growth?  These new profitable online marketing services from Lunarpages are definitely the way to go.  Check out our new marketing services today, and learn how you can help you become the number one resource in your field.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don′t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

Finding a red theme is never fun, because truth be told, there are not that many good looking red themes out there.  There are a lot of phpBB themes out there – however, finding free themes that are red is a difficult task, indeed.  I have searched the Web myself though, and I have returned with four of the greatest looking red phpBB skins in existence today.

Milky Way Red – Preview it – Download it

Sliced – Preview it – Download it

Reds – Preview it – Download it

RedSilver – Preview it – Download it

There you have it, some of the best looking red themes for the phpBB message board script.  Lunarpages comes ready to serve you in hosting a phpBB powered forum on just about every hosting plan we provide too.  Which one is your favorite?  Do you know of another red phpBB skin that is better?  Send in your comments and let us know what you think!

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

On the Lunarpages blog this month we have been discussing some of the greatest scripts out there that you can install on just about any web hosting plan Lunarpages offers to you.  For those who might have missed it, here is a roundup of all the third-party script reviews we did over the month of November.

Best phpBB Web Host Out There?

Could Lunarpages in fact be the greatest phpBB web host out there?  I would say so.  For those of you who do not know, phpBB is one of the most widely used open source forum solutions to date. 

Magento Hosting Comes to Lunarpages

As a professional and open-source e-commerce solution, Magento is offering your online store access to unprecedented flexibility and control.  You can also get it up and running here with Lunarpages, if you are using one of our new LPCP controlled accounts.

Hosting with osCommerce

One of the most widely used shopping cart scripts out there is osCommerce.  It gives the shop owner an open-source online e-commerce solution.  You might have already known that, however did you know a number of our web hosting plans come with a way to get it installed in a single click?

Get bbPress Hosting at Lunarpages

Yesterday, we took a look at WordPress, so today I figured we would check out it’s message board (and less popular) brother from another mother, bbPress.  Forum software can often be slow, bloated and filled with holes – however bbPress is the total opposite. The focus is around being easy to use, speedy, and compliant.

Vanilla Web Forum Hosting at Lunarpages

Lunarpages fully supports the lightweight and simple Vanilla forum script.  What is Vanilla? It is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, fully extensible discussion forum for the Web. While it is not supported via the cPanel’s Fantastico or LPCP’s WebApps manager, the script is simple enough for anybody to download, setup and install in minutes. 

E-Commerce Hosting with Zen Cart

The free, user-friendly and open source shopping cart software, Zen Cart is perfect for any e-commerce web site hosted at Lunarpages.  With the thoughts of shop owners, programmers, designers and more in mind, Zen Cart is one of the best third-party shopping cart scripts out there.

PHPlist Hosting with Lunarpages

One of the world’s best open-source newsletter managers can be installed a number of different ways, here at Lunarpages.  PHPlist is a free script that will handle all your  newsletter or mailing lists for you.  It is downloaded over 10,000 tie per month – and is possibly one of the most popular open-source scripts.

WordPress Hosting at Lunarpages

All this month, on the Lunartics blog, we will highlight some of our favorite third-party scripts.  From image galleries to message boards, there will be a little something for everybody.  To get things started, I thought I would discuss with you why WordPress is my absolute favorite blogging script.

SMF Web Hosting at Lunarpages

Possibly one of the best forum scripts out there to date, Simple Machines Forum, is more than welcome to be hosted here at Lunarpages, on many of our web hosting plans.   It is a free, professional grade software package that will have you setup with your own online community in just seconds.

Get Your Joomla Hosting on at Lunarpages

The award winning content management system, which enables you to build web sites and powerful online applications is more than welcome at Lunarpages.  Joomla is all that, and so much more.  For people looking for an easy to use and powerful script to manage their digital empire, Joomla is a good way to go.

For more help with third-party scripts at Lunarpages, be sure co check out our web hosting wiki.

Related Tips and Tricks:

• SMF Web Hosting at Lunarpages
• Vanilla Web Forum Hosting at Lunarpages
• Get bbPress Hosting at Lunarpages

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

Could Lunarpages in fact be the greatest phpBB web host out there?  I would say so.  For those of you who do not know, phpBB is one of the most widely used open source forum solutions to date.  It’s user friendly installation process and easy to use administration panel has made it one of the most popular forum scripts out there too. 

At Lunarpages, you have the option to install phpBB manually, via cPanel’s Fantastico script collection or if you have the LPCP control panel, through the WebApps Pool.  Every method listed, is very simple to do.  You can customize phpBB to fit any situation.  With the modifications and styles they provide, you will be able to setup a set of forums that are powerful enough for your needs and look just the way you want them to look.

• Learn More About the phpBB Features

The only big flaw I can find with a script like phpBB is it is very exploit prone.  Due to the fact that it is very popular, it gets hit with security issues more than your average forum script.

Need Help? To help you get started, here are a few tutorials to help:

• How to Install phpBB onto Your Own Hosting Account
• CHMOD Permissions for phpBB
• How to Create a Private Forum

You can find more help and tutorials about phpBB at the web hosting wiki too.  The folks at OpenSourceCMS also provide a demo of phpBB you can try out before you install it on your own web hosting account. 

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

Keep watching the Lunartics blog all throughout the month on November for even more third-party script suggestions, tutorials, tips and more.  You can also get tons of information and details about just a handful of the third-party scripts we support on the web hosting wiki.  We also have a special forum dedicated to third-party script discussions over at the Lunarforums.  Subscribe today to the Lunartics RSS feed for instant updates when we release a new script suggestion!

Related Tips and Tricks:

• Web Hosting Forums Get a New Design
• Hosting with osCommerce
• SMF Web Hosting at Lunarpages

&copy Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don′t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

The October edition of the Lunarpages customer newsletter has been released, and is chalked full of web hosting goodness.  If you have not checked it out yet – here are just a few things you are missing out on:

• LunarNews: October 2009
• Free Flash Templates for Your Website!
• Get Started with Quantcast Tracking Support Lunarpages from Twitter!
• ID vs Class in CSS Web Design
• Lunarpages Gives Back to Customers
• Mind Maps for Webmasters
• 20 Ear Entertaining Bookmarks
• Importance of Permalinks in WordPress
• Lunar Picks – What’s Your Favorite Scary Movie?

Don’t be the last one to check it out!  Use the links above to browse through this most recent gathering of tutorials, tips, guides, news and more wrapped up for you and presented by your buddies at Lunarpages.  We are all about the treats, and none of the tricks this October.

Related Tips and Tricks:

• Ping Your Site Map to Bing
• 60+ Links to Help You Learn CSS Web Design
• Basics of CSS in Web Design

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

Adding a Cascading Style Sheet to your current web site layout and save you time and make your web site look a lot more professional in the process.  Cascading Style Sheets, or sometimes referred to as CSS, is a style sheet language used to describe how a web page should be formatted.

For example, if you wanted to make some text on a web page look bold, you might use this snippet of HTML code:

<strong>this will be some bold text!</strong>

Which seems simple enough.  However, what if you want to chance the color, font, and how this text is shown in that spot across all of your web pages?  Well then your HTML in your pages becomes a rambling mess.  That is where Cascading Style Sheets come in handy.

Cascading Style Sheets allow you to, in a much more organized way, sort out how your web site design looks in a totally separate file, or chunk of code in between the head tags.    For example, let say you wanted the title of your page to be bold, green, and a different font style than the rest of the page.  In your HTML code, you would use something like this:

<p class="mycooltitle">this is my page title</p>

That tells the browser that everything within this paragraph or <p></p> tags will follow the design setup class I have defined as “mycooltitle”.  Now, in between the head tags (<head> </head>) I want you to add this:

<style type="text/css">
    .mycooltitle {
        font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
        font-weight: bold;
        color: #336633;
    }
</style>

This CSS code tells the web browser to apply these design settings to the class marked, “mycooltitle”.  It does three things.  It says it will use the Verdana font, the font will be bolded, and it will be colored green (#336633 is the HTML color code for a shade of green).

That is how you apply Cascading Style Sheets to your web design and layout of your own web pages.  One of the major benefits of using CSS is that it helps to separate your web site code with your design.  This way, you can change one aspect very easily in the CSS file (when or if you start to master external style sheets).  I’ll save that lesson for another day.

Related Tips and Tricks:

• Wizzypage – Great (and free!) Web Site Editor
• Inspiring Web Design
• CSS Round Box Generator

&copy; Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don′t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

So, what is better than link shortening?

Bacon.

What is better than bacon?

Nothing at all.

If you can understand that, then you can understand bacn.me.  This bacon inspired link shortening service is brought to you by those bacon loving people at Bacn.com.  You don’t know them you say?  Why they are just the a group of bacon enthusiasts drawn together with the dream of providing access to the world’s best bacon. What isn’t to love?

Back to bacn.me, like many other link shorteners before it, you give it your long URL and it spits back out a bacon flavored short URL.  You can login to the site using an OpenID, so you can see how many clicks your links are getting.  Also featured are a bookmarklet for easier link shortening and the list of top bac’n URLs. 

So what have we learned? 

Tiny URLs + Bacon = Fun for the Whole Family.

Related Tips and Tricks:

• Link Checking with Xenu Link Sleuth
• Weekend Project &ndash; Create a Google-Friendly Sitemap
• Preview, Review and Download Free Fonts!

&copy; Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

Dear Citizens of Lunarville,

Yeah, I said it – Lunarpages sucks when it comes to meeting my expectations. How dare they go above and beyond the call of duty time and time again when I expect far less from them.  Oh, you want an example?

What about the time they offered to renew my account, saving me $50 in the process, and making me keep more of my own money in my wallet.  My wallet is very small, and is not used to having that much extra cash.

You know what else they did to me?  They told me I could give them two e-mail addresses to contact me at if anything ever happened to my web site.  Oh, so I guess now they really want to make sure if something bad happens they want to be able to reach me?  The jokes on them, my web site hasn’t even been down once since I signed up.

The one that puts the proverbial cherry on top of that darn web hosting ice cream sundae is the fact that they keep giving me web hosting tutorials to learn from.  Week after week I keep finding thing on their web hosting wiki to learn from.  What do they think, I don’t enjoy spending hours trying to figure out my problems?  Not only are they stuffing my pockets with more money, they are saving me more time in my day.  I guess now I have plenty of time to figure out how to get that extra money into my wallet.

This isn’t the last you have heard from me either – I will be back with even more ridiculous ways Lunarpages keeps sticking it to me with their “friendly” and “quality” service.

Yours Truly,

The Perplexed Patron

Related Tips and Tricks:

• August Newsletter is Reeking of Awesomeness
• Real Affordable Web Hosting at $2.95 a Month!
• Free CrazyEgg Click Tracking – Favorite Web Development Freebies (Part 5 of 5)

&copy Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by PerplexedPatron

“HP announced new consulting services to help enterprise customers consider incorporating the cloud as part of their broader IT strategy”, “PEER 1 launched its CloudXcelerator program… which lets its partners to develop, test and run their cloud applications on the company’s IT hosting infrastructure”, “The web designers’ guide to cloud hosting”, these are one try […]

Original post by Your (optional) podcast author email address (http://hostingblog.b10wh.com/)

I would like to thank you to Keith Dunlan, the publisher of Ping! Zine Web Hosting Magazine for featuring my article “Time For Cloudware” in Ping!Zine’s Issue # 33. He is a great guy who is behind the longest running web hosting magazine in the United States. Download the PDF version of the new issue […]

Original post by Your (optional) podcast author email address (http://hostingblog.b10wh.com/)