I want to make a webpage to start an NGO mentioned in this thread.
forumosa.com/3/viewtopic.php?t=9499
I was looking at GeoCities at Yahoo but don’t like all the pop ups.
Any recommendations for a place to start a webpage?
Angelfire or Lycos
I like Tripod for free sites. And here’s something I learned by accident (really)–if you use javascript, you don’t get pop ups.
Braxton, do you mean “if you DON’T use javascript”? Or is there something special about Tripod where, if you code JavaScript into your webpage, it doesn’t pop up any ads??
If you meant the former, the problem is that everyone who looks at the page has to turn off JavaScript in their browsers; it’s not something that the person who creates the page can do.
Boomer, you don’t mention whether you want to pay for webhosting or not. If you are willing to pay, there are many thousands of hosting companies. If you want a free ride, you’re probably going to be stuck with a very unprofessional-looking website that pops up ads for all sorts of ridiculous things when people look at it.
What’s your monthly price range?
I just looked at the other thread and saw that you are considering GeoCities because “it can be found by search engines”.
That’s completely backwards.
GeoCities sites are not particularly loved by search engines (in fact, I created a page there nearly two years ago, and STILL can’t find it in Google). Rather, there just happen to be a whole lot of pages in GeoCities, and so the search engines happen to have indexed a lot of them already.
The way to get added to search engines is, basically, to be popular. If some people add a link to your homepage from theirs, sooner or later a search engine “spider” will bump into the link and add it into the search engine’s database. If a lot of people add a link to your homepage from theirs, Google ranks it as a desirable page to find. This is how Google is able to “rate” pages for suitability. (Well, that and the pigeons.) 
I use www.8-95.com It actually comes out to be $18 USD a year, but I find it to be extremely reasonable and relatively reliable. Add another $8 for your domain name and for $26 a year, you can have tons of fun/anguish =) Much more professional and many more features than any of the free ones. Especially if you plan to put pictures up.
MaPoDoFu,
All I know is that the Tripod site I was using before didn’t have the usual Tripod popups and when I mentioned it to someone, he/she said it was because of the Javascript I had on all the pages. It wasn’t anything special… just something I must have gotten off of www.javascriptsource.com
Please define “relatively reliable”??
I’d be concerned with using them because they use “spamcop”/“ordb” to block incoming email. My current ISP uses that sort of thing, and I lost contact with several friends and family members for weeks because all of their email to me was being blocked. I didn’t have a clue until my father complained during a phone call.
I didn’t find out about this until months after they implemented it. I can only only guess at whether some potential employer tried to contact me, only to have their email rudely bounced. This might have cost me a job opportunity that would have allowed me to stay in the U.S.
Getting back to it, if 8-95 will turn off their antispam nonsense for you, it might be worth it. Otherwise I would suggest using someplace else.
Other than that, their plan would be well-suited for how I want to set up my email now. But unless they can turn off that malfeature, there’s no way I’d touch them. I emailed them to ask if they would; guess I’ll wait and see what they say.
My complaints:
The DNS is a bit slow, and once the server was down for about 24 hours.
Pluses: Web-based email is set up by default. Ability to use mySQL databases (good for blogs and other stuff). Perl, SSI, etc.
AFAIK, spam blocking is turned off by default. You can choose to turn it on for specific email addresses.
[quote=“answerer”]My complaints:
The DNS is a bit slow, and once the server was down for about 24 hours.
Pluses: Web-based email is set up by default. Ability to use mySQL databases (good for blogs and other stuff). Perl, SSI, etc.
AFAIK, spam blocking is turned off by default. You can choose to turn it on for specific email addresses.[/quote]
That actually sounds pretty decent, overall, especially considering the price. I’m still waiting to hear back from them on the spam-blocking; if it can be shut off, they’ll work out great for what I want to do. Thanks much for recommending them!
BTW, Braxton, I looked through that JavaScript site. I didn’t see anything to stop popups (lots to cause them!); if you still have that website, please let me know where it is, I’d love to take a look and see how you did it. BTW, did you pay them for the site? (If so, that may be why the popups stopped – GeoCities has that option, IIRC.)
Edited three days later to add:
Finally dug up 8-95’s phone number through their NetSol registration and called to get answers. The woman who answered was pretty nice about it, especially considering it was 11pm in Alabama. 
She said the antispam system can be turned on or off by using the customer’s “control panel” webpage.
Edited 6/21 to add:
Finally got everything set up. I don’t know how it will work out long-term, but so far they have provided everything I needed. Email is working without a hitch, and for the extremely simple HTML-and-a-few-JPGs website that I put up, the speed is better than my ISP’s (which isn’t really saying much, so perhaps I should say their server speed seems just fine).
Oh, the antispam stuff that I was worried about can be turned on and off on a per-address basis, using one, both, or neither of the antispam systems. So, the publicly-listed address can have automatic spam removal, while a trusted-friends-and-family address can be left unfiltered. All in all a pretty good deal, at least so far.
My only concern is that at the price they’re charging, I hope they don’t oversell their service (too many users on a server == too slow of a system) or go out of business. My now-ex ISP tried the “low budget” model, and it became totally useless because the owner had no money for upgrades. (At least, that was his eternal excuse, but a lot of the problem is that he’s also a complete idiot.)