Web Concepts

By Mitch “The Hostmaster” Keeler

From time to time we do receive a few frequently asked questions about our domain name registrations. I figured I would tackle a few of the most often asked ones here to help out any other current Lunarpages customers with questions or new ones who may not know yet.

What type of domains can Lunarpages register?

Lunarpages can register .com, .org, .us, .biz, .info, .name, .net, and .co.uk.

How can current customers register an additional domain name with Lunarpages?

You can add domain name registrations right from our Customer Account Page. New domain name registrations only cost $9.95 per domain name and then the same price for every year after that.

What if we don’t have a credit card on record with our account?

If that is the case, all you need to do is e-mail support@lunarapges.com with the following:

• Primary Domain Name:
• User Name:
• Home Address:
• First/Last Digits of Your Password:
• New Domain You Would Like to Register:

How can we transfer our domain name registered elsewhere to Lunarpages?

Send the same information as requested above to the same address, and we can get that taken care of for you there too. Here are a few more articles that should help you with any and all of your domain name questions you might have:

• Domain Name Transfers
• Domain Transfers and Domain Lifecycle

Also don’t forget about your free domain for life you get with the Basic and Business hosting plans.

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Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Tutorial Finder” Keeler

Now that the WordPress Design Contest (version 2!) is on its way I have been getting a lot of questions that sound a lot like this one:  I want to enter the contest, but I am not sure exactly how to create a theme for WordPress? As long as you know some things about web site design, CSS and working with templates - you should have little to no problem at all.  Here are a few tutorials though to get you started with the theme design process:

WordPress.org - Theme Development

WordPress.org -  Designing Themes for Public Release

Wordpress Tutorial: How to Create a Wordpress Theme

So you want to create WordPress themes huh?

How to Create a WordPress Template or Theme

Make Your Own WordPress Theme

Have any other favorite WordPress theme tutorials you would like to share?  Feel free to drop them into the comments!

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Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Mr. Organization” Keeler

Not many of you might of realized that yesterday was the first day of Spring. That means that soon the birds will start chirping, the grass will turn green and summer will be coming up pretty quickly. So as with any other Spring tradition, it is now time to start thinking about Spring cleaning.

How do you do spring cleaning with your web site though? Well here are ten spring cleaning tips for your web site or online business that might help you get started.

1. Update Any Scripts and Plugins - Look at WordPress, Joomla and any other scripts or services you have installed and see if it is time to give them an upgrade. You should be doing this more often than every spring but now is a good time to check and make sure.
2. Do Your E-mail Addresses Work? - I recently got an e-mail from a friend who told me, “Sorry I didn’t get back to you I just figured out I had major problems with my e-mail account”. Send yourself a dummy message to make sure you don’t fall into the same boat.
3. Clean up Your Sidebars - This ‘bit of advice would be mainly for blogs. I have seen some people become really addicted to having sidebar widgets and gadgets. If you have more than five per sidebar, might be time to ditch some or at least make them look pretty again.
4. Review your Terms of Service - Make sure your terms of service and acceptable use policy are up to date and include everything you wish to include there. You may have made some changes to your web site and business since the last time you reviewed it so check it out now to make sure all your bases are still covered.
5. Check and Update your Sitemaps - If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, it might be a good time to login and check to make sure Google didn’t find any errors, which would keep them from indexing certain parts of your web site.
6. Is Your Contact Information Correct? - Check out your contact page and make sure that the numbers, e-mail addresses and postal addresses listed there are up to date and show the correct information.
7. Renew Your Domains - When does your domain name run out of date? Might need to check and also be sure that you have all your hosting bills paid up too. This also makes for a good time to upgrade your hosting account to one with a few more perks.
8. Test Your Web Site Links - Are all your web site links working? Check your error logs in your various stats packages to see where people are finding 404s and try to fix all the broken links or non-existent pages you can find.
9. How Out of Date is Your “About Us” Section? - Checking out my own about us page on one of my other web sites I see I pretty much haven’t updated it since the launch of the site. Always good to keep this up to date because well, this is how people lean more about you and what you do.
10. Spellcheck Your Web Site Content - How many grammar errors can you find on your web site? If you don’t want to read through everything you have posted - you might try just going through a few of the most popular ones and making sure they are correct. Bad spelling really peeves some people, so best not to get on anybody’s bad side.

Have any more suggestion? Be sure to leave a comment to share with the rest of us.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch "Finding Freebies" Keeler

I am always happy to help when we get a question in here to the Lunartics blog to answer.  This time around we were asked if we knew of any free background resources?  Here are a few of the best ones I have found.

• DinPattern
• Squidfingers
• Pattern4U
• Citrus Moon Patterns
• Photoshop Support
• Tile Machine
• Kaliber10000

Backgrounds can often add flair and class to a usually boring and mundane web site.  Know of another great place to find your tiled or large web site backgrounds?

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Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “cPanel is Your Friend” Keeler

Your .htaccess file, with any Apache based server or hosting account is a very powerful tool that if you can learn to use for your advantage can help you complete many time consuming or difficult tasks with ease. How do you create one though for your web hosting account? This is a question that we get here time to time, and here is your solution.

Login to your cPanel with your user name and password, then once you have made it in, head over to your File Manager. Now the File Manager’s interface is a very familiar Windows-styled look at your files on your hosting account. You will want to click on your folder icon next to your public_html link next, that will take you to the insides of the public_html folder.

Inside you will see all your web site files. You need to scan down the page till you see the bold text, Create a New File. Click that and you should get in the upper-right corner a box with a few more setting to fill in. In the empty text box, put in .htaccess. Keep the drop down box on Text Document and then hit the Create button.

Now you have your .htaccess file inside of your public_html folder all with the help of cPanel and your helpful File Manger.

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Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “The Transfererer” Keeler

One of the web hosting basics that all must eventually learn about and master is the art of FTP. FTP stands for file transfer protocol and acts as a way for you to move files and folders from your PC to your hosting account Online. With any of the Lunarpages web hosting accounts - this option is available to you.

Some of my top choices for FTP clients would be:

• FileZilla - One of if not the most popular open source FTP client out there today. Highly suggested solution for your file transferring needs.
• CoreFTP - Another awesome free and paid FTP program that features site file transfers, auto try failed transfers, one click transfers, keep alive functionality and more.
• SmartFTP - The best looking of the free FTP programs out there that you could use. SmartFTP is also a name you can trust, as they have been providing a good service for years.

When filling out your account information, this is what you should put in each box:

Hostname: For this, you would need to put in yourdomain.com (where yourdomain.com is your actual domain name) or servername.lunarpages.com (also where it says lunarpages.com this information might also change. See your welcome e-mail for more information).

User Name: This would be your account user name that you put in. This is the same one you use to login to your control panel.

Password: The password you can use, is the same one you use to login to your control panel.

That should be it. Try it out and see if it connects. If not, you might double check to make sure that you got all of your connection information correct. Yet again, this would be a good time to check back with your welcome e-mail to make sure that your information matches there with what you put in.

Also as a bonus we have a number of video tutorials to help you get your FTP account up and running.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Your Talent Agent” Keeler

If you have a nack for writing or helping other people out please feel free to submit your own work to us. We are looking to feature one customer written article per month in our web hosting newsletter. The only thing that we ask is that the work is your own and does not belong to anybody else. Each month, month after month we will select one to toss into the Newsletter for the month.

Interested? Submit your articles to mitch.keeler@lunarpages.com with the title “LP Newsletter Article Submission”. Also be sure to include your Lunarpages hosted URL and name so that we can give you a shout out for your fabulous work. Starting next month we will feature one customer article per newsletter. If we don’t use your article one month, we will keep it on record and we may use it the next month.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Tipster” Keeler

Think of it as one of those sticky fly traps you hang outside in the summer to keep the flying insects away from your BB&Q. You don’t want to just lead people to your site, you want to lead them to it - get them interested and then catch them. Don’t let them go because they might not come back. Hooking visitors is a sweet science I am not sure anybody has really mastered to a T (or Mr. T). These tips should help you get on the right track though when it comes making your visitors come back.

Social Interaction - Add something like the AddThis.com or ShareThis.com badges to your web site so that people can share that information with others in the way that suits them best.

Vote - Don’t overlook the idea of adding polls to your web site layout. Giving your viewers something to do will keep them on your web site a little longer. One easy way of getting a poll up and running would be via PollDaddy.com.

Blog it - Think your web site is a little light weight, and could use some more “meat and potatoes”? A blog would be a great way to fill your web site out a little more and keep your visitors coming back for more. I would highly suggest installing WordPress for your blogging needs, but there are many alternatives.

Build a Community - Forums always come in handy to help build a community or start one. SMF is probably the most reliable of the bunch in my opinion. With it your visitors can talk with you and each other.

Syndication - If you can, toss in some RSS feeds for your visitors to grab. This way they can subscribe to your web site’s content, get updates about your latest news, and have a trail back to your web site past that first visit. Once you do get an RSS feed going hook it up with a service like FeedBurner to track how many people are subscribing.

Know of anymore helpful tips to make you web site viewers come back for more? I’d love to hear ‘em.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

I have gotten a handful of e-mails from people asking me to go over and explain blogging. From head to toe, first you need to find a blogging script to use, then you need to find the best way for you to blog and lastly you need something to blog about.

Blog and Content Management Scripts

Of course, to setup a blog you must first have a good blogging script or content management system. Here are a few of the best alternatives out there to choose from:

• WordPress
• Drupal
• AJAXPress
• CuteNews
• MovableType
• Textpattern
• Serendipity
• Joomla
• b2evolution
• blojsom
• Sblog
• Expression Engine
• blosxom
• Simplog
• Nucleus
• Wikiblog
• bBlog

Best Tools to Blog?

There are a number of tools out there that will help you to post to your blog. One of the best of the best out there (and yes, it even surprised me!) Is Windows Live Writer.

I can tell you from personal experience it is a superb companion to WordPress (because it is what I am using to write this, right now!). All you need to do is plugin your WordPress login info and address and it does the work for you. If you are using Firefox, then you might want to look at the ScribeFire addon.

(more…)

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Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “FTP(it is my middle name)” Keeler

CoreFTP might be overlooked by some, but it too is a grand way to get your files from your PC to your hosting account and back the other way. If fully supports all the FTP bells and whistles and has both a great paid and free version.

Features for the CoreFTP download include site to site file transfers, auto try failed transfers, one click transfers, keep alive functionality and more. It also has a site manager where you can keep all your own web sites and favorite FTP sites saved without having to re-type your information each time.

CoreFTP Pro: Simple 2 pane interface is easy to use and understand.

CoreFTP Con: Interface could be a little more on the pretty side.

Download CoreFTP! | Visit CoreFTP’s Web Site

They offer both a free and a paid version of the product. If I was to make a top ten of my favorite FTP clients, CoreFTP would at least be in the top five. It is a client that gives you a reliable way to update and maintain your own digital domain.

+ Check Out More Freeware and Open Source Applications!

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Original post by Mitch