New Website Up and Running

For several years, I've owned the domain name dumaguetecity.net. For the first few years, I had the web hosting done by the same company that registers my domain name. However, when company A began charging too much for their web hosting, I changed over to company B for the hosting while keeping the registry with company A.

I recently received an email from company B letting me know that my current billing cycle would end March 15 - the dreadful Ides of March, no less. The price to renew was much more than I was willing to pay to continue having the hosting done by company B.

My original goal with this website was to try and make a few bucks with Affiliate ads and Google AdSense. For a couple of years, this was breaking even. I was getting enough revenue to, at least, pay my web hosting fee. Unfortunately, the web site has not brought in any money in quite a long time.

To make matters worse, my web design capabilities have not kept up with the upsurge in mobile web surfing. I was never able to get the hang of designing a site that was "mobile friendly".

I looked at the situation, and decided to cancel my hosting account with company B at the end of the current billing cycle and use Google's blogger.com (where this blog is located) to host the domain name as a "blog".

It's free....and free is good.

After setting up a new blog called dumaguetecitynet, I was instructed by Google to go to the domain registry site and change the DNS (CNAME) in order to redirect traffic from dumaguetecity.net to the blogger.com address.

Easier said than done.

I went onto company A's website and made the changes as given by Google. I was told changes could take 24 hours. After 36 hours, I began a live chat with a rep from company A. I was told that I'd have to contact company B to make the changes. I was to contact the hosting company not the company that registered the domain name.

After a couple of on line chats with Ron, the tech from company B, I was finally able to get everything up and running.

Now, when you go to dumaguetecity.net, you're led where I want you to go.

Fortunately, the website is now mobile friendly.

Upcoming Changes to the Website are in the Works.

I have had difficulties with my website, www.dumaguetecity.net.

For the most part, I've been trying to design the website myself with my limited knowledge of html. Unfortunately, with the rise of mobile usage and the overall decline of desktop pc surfing, I've haven't done such a good job keeping up. Google has let me know in uncertain terms that the website is not mobile friendly.

It will be three years in March since I last renewed my account with a web hosting company and the agreement expires on March 15. I've decided that rather than renew the account, I will cancel my business relationship with Webhostingpad  and use Google's blogspot site to host dumaguetecity.net from now on. I've been using a different company to keep my domain name registered. I'll continue to use that 2nd company.

Using the blogspot site with their themes, I'll be able to have the website both mobile and pc friendly, although I'll need to made a few adjustments on how I manage the pages. That will take some thought.

Further Modifications.

Yesterday, I began to make changes to the Dumaguete Website following some of the suggestions from Google Webmaster Tools.

After a bit of trial and error, I was able to alter the index page to suit viewers using Androids. I wasn't completely happy with the page as seen from a desktop PC, but I was willing to compromise one for the other.

A problem arose when I looked at the site using Google Chrome, rather than Firefox. The Home page was a disaster.


I had to go back again, and try to make changes that would work on both browsers.

Some of the web pages will be more difficult modifying for viewing on mobiles; particular the pen pal websites. It's recommend that the buttons on a webpage should be large enough to accommodate fingers on a mobile phone screen. That was easy enough on a page with relatively few buttons, but the pen pal page, as it's designed, has 35 buttons.

I'll have to give serious thought to how I'll set up the new page.

Modifications on the Dumaguete Website.

This morning I received an email from Google Webmaster Tools informing me that -

"Google systems have tested 61 pages from your site and found that 100% of them have critical mobile usability errors. The errors on these 61 pages severely affect how mobile users are able to experience your website. These pages will not be seen as mobile-friendly by Google Search, and will therefore be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users."

I inspected the mobile issues and I've corrected some, but there are too many (according to Google) for me to fix all the errors right away.

I'm not even certain that I can fix them all.

At any rate, I've resized the buttons on index page, re-centered the page, and compressed a few images. That has helped some of their "desktop issues", but not all the mobile ones.

I'll have to work on this a bit at a time.