Moving away from iweb and mobilme hosting, not sure where to start.

[MattinMaine]

Hi,

I have a small custom stonework business which I promote through a website- greenislandstonework dot com. I've been very happy with the simplicity of iweb over the years, and have been hosted by me.com all along. It's been so easy to drag and drop photos and rewrite text from time to time, and keep making simple tweaks and changes, especially for a technically-challenged person like me. My site is heavy on photos and portfolios and it's nice to change it up every few weeks.

The problem is, the party is going to be over soon. me.com will stop hosting in a couple of months and rumor has it that iweb will no longer be supported.

On the surface it seems that I can just switch hosts and limp along with iweb indefinitely, whether apple supports it or not, (but I would imagine it will just cease to work well after a while, when it becomes technologically obsolete) Can anyone give me advise on whether this is an accurate analysis?

My other thought is that maybe I should just start working on building a site on wordpress.org, host it on bluehost maybe(?), and eventually switch the domain away from me.com and on to bluehost for a seamless transition to a brand new site once I have built the wordpress site. If I do that should I just start with wordpress and find a host later when I'm ready to link it all to my domain?

I have used blogger a little for some side projects, but not very impressed.

I'm sure to most I sound like an idiot, (I'm not really sure how any of this works), but I'm just not into the nuts and bolts of it. I just want to open my laptop and have everything work.

Any advise would be super!

[zomex]

Hello,

It sounds like the website was build using an drag and drop website builder from iweb?

If they built the software used to create your website I'm afraid there's no way to transfer it to another host with this same software. However, you could always hire a web developer to re-create your website with software such as Wordpress (basically a free, popular & easy to use website builder). Once that's done it would simply be a matter of transferring your domain to a new company and opening a new web hosting account.

That would be my recommendation based on the situation. With Wordpress you'll be able to add/manage/change content on your website as you do now but without any risk of this happening again as Wordpress is free and supported by most web hosting companies.

Jack

[Bill the Builder]

The short answer is you could have it rebuilt and brought up to date with a professional look for about $300. then just host it at $5-6 per month where ever you like since it is you content.

The longer answer is to start now on building a site. Since it is a static site for your business, I would not mess with blogs as they are poorly suited for this. There are some basic site design software you can use for 30 days free to get yourself a new site and moved to a new server. If you put some work into it. then it is more time than cost.

[zomex]

The longer answer is to start now on building a site. Since it is a static site for your business, I would not mess with blogs as they are poorly suited for this. There are some basic site design software you can use for 30 days free to get yourself a new site and moved to a new server. If you put some work into it. then it is more time than cost.

I wouldn't consider Wordpress blogging software, it's a CMS that is extremely powerful for building websites. The reason for suggesting this is because it would allow the OP to add images to a gallery in a similar drag and drop way.

For a website builder I'd recommend Homestead. I used this service 3 years ago to build my first website and their website builder is the best I've seen but it costs around $20/month when I was using it so it's probably different now.

[weblover50]

I wouldn't consider Wordpress blogging software, it's a CMS that is extremely powerful for building websites. The reason for suggesting this is because it would allow the OP to add images to a gallery in a similar drag and drop way.

Exactly. WP is a very powerful platform, running anything from a classifieds site, membership site, coupons site and so on . Using it as a CMS is a very practical solution and I believe it is the most common use as well. It make have some learning curve for a non technical person, but WP is the right direction for you.