Jason Garber offers website hosting to his clients using the Radiant content management system (CMS). With the hosted CMS, you can easily edit your content from anywhere in the world. No software is required on your end—just log in and make your changes. It’s easy to use and comes with friendly, personal email support from me.
There are thousands of other content management systems, but I have found Radiant to be the best at balancing the capabilities web designers need with the simplicity and ease-of-use clients want. It won’t let you point-and-click your way to a pretty little webpage (try Google Sites if that’s what you’re looking for), but it does let you and a web professional collaborate on a handsome, professional, and functional site that uses web standards.
Radiant CMS is free, open-source software. I simply provide the installation (along with a few extensions that add extra features), maintenance, upgrades, and support. If you’re interested, please and we’ll discuss your needs.
The CMS makes it simple to publish your website. You don’t need to know HTML, buy an expensive program, or upload and download your pages over FTP. Just log in and start adding content from work, home, or on the road.
Textile is a simple way to make headlines, links, lists, and insert images without knowing HTML. I’ve made it even easier by adding a Textile toolbar. For example, if you want to make some text bold, click the B button and it surrounds the text with asterisks, which in Textile indicates bold text.
Why Textile and not a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) editor? In my experience, with these editors what you see is seldom actually what you get (ask anyone who has used Dreamweaver or Wordpress!) and they tend to produce HTML code that goes against several “best practices” in web design:
Given a WYSIWYG tool, most people just make their headlines the desired size and color rather than using the correct tags and a stylesheet to declare the font, color, size, and margin of all headlines. The result is inconsistent styling and much more work when you want to update the look of your site later.
If you wanted forms on your website in the past, you’d have to find a programmer who could write the computer code that would receive form data and email it to you. Any changes to the form meant you had to have the code changed.
Radiant CMS Hosting enables you to build the form using simple form tags—no programming! We’ll help you set up your first form and then you can edit it whenever you like.
How did spammers get your email address in the first place? More than likely it was because you put it on the web in unprotected form. Spam robots scan the web for these unprotected email addresses for the spammer’s own list or to sell.
Radiant CMS Hosting provides a simple tool that encodes your email address so humans can read it and click on it, but to spambots it’s gibberish. Just click the link button in the toolbar, select “Email” and enter your address. Now you have a safe way for customers to contact you.
Adding images to your site is simple: Attach the file to the page just like an email attachment. Then save the page and click the image button in the toolbar. All the files attached to that page are listed. Select the one you want and it inserts the image.
Now let’s say you want to link to minutes.pdf from yoursite.com/board. Just attach the PDF to your boards page, then save the page and click the link button in the toolbar and choose the PDF.
I do weekly remote backups to protect against accidental or catastrophic data loss and I use a monitoring service that checks every 60 minutes to make sure your website is still up and running.
