I had been commissioned to re-design the website of a local Homeowners Association a few months ago. The old website was hosted by one of the big box web services that do not offer too much flexibility and probably you don’t get the value for the money you spend. Click the image below to visit the new website.

It was a different experience from my day job as IT Consultant for large corporations. The fun part is, that I was not given any requirements, besides: Setup a new website because the old one sucks! (In Plain English). Well, here we go.

I have been setting up my own websites and one for an acquaintance many, many years ago when I was using Frontpage, Java scripts and HTML coding, as skill set I have forgotten by now.

Now, having hosted my own websites since late 90′, I have some experience and connections. To get the project started, I had to register a new, more compelling domain name, cancel the old domain name and take ownership of it so that visitors could be re-directed to the new domain name. As I did not want to continue using the service of the original hosting company, I had to setup a new hosting account for this new website, change the DNS information for the old and new domain name, etc, etc, and get the ball rolling.

For ease of use, I decided to use WordPress as platform as it is very flexible, offers a ton of Plugins that are monitored by Wordfence to make sure I am informed about vulnerability. WordPress also updates the plugins and standard code with the latest patches. Having said that, maintenance is much easier than writing websites in PHP, HTML or so and having to keep the code updated all the times.

Please use the contact form if you have any questions in regards to this project or if you need some guidance to get your own website up & running.