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2012 February

Monthly Archives: February 2012

Starting a Web Design Business: Intro

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Wow, I’ve worked at Peak Systems now for 5 years! Although I’ve enjoyed working at Peak, it’s time to move on and start my own business again. This will be my 4th web design business, and each time I’ve started up a web design business, it’s been more successful and more rewarding. My last business, ABD Insights, was acquired by Peak Systems in 2007, and I brought over my clients, myself, and my employee (& friend) Hahn to Peak. But now, with all that I’ve learned from Peak and from my past businesses, it’s time to start a new adventure!

Luckily, I have years of experience and expertise with web design and running a business so it’s familiar ground. But this time around as I get things started, I’m going to chronicle this process and hopefully others (you) can use this as a valuable resource.

Contact7 Not Working on Windows Server

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I have SBA / Crystal Tech hosting and since it’s Windows hosting, it doesn’t like the standard PHP mail functions. Thus, the Contact 7 plug-in doesn’t work.

The way around that is to install the WP Mail SMTP plugin.

Make sure to change the mail server from ‘localhost’ to the mail server associated with your hosting account. In the control panel, if it says ‘MAILA69′, you’ll want to enter in the full URL: maila69.webcontrolcenter.com

Changing File Permissions on SBA / Crystal Tech

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So I had a real issue with this. I tried using Dreamweaver, then WinSCP to change the file permissions for 2 files within the root directory that needed to be writable on the server. No dice. Nothing worked.

With SBA hosting, you can change file permissions for folders but not for individual files. There is an option though to ‘include all sub files and folders’ – that’s all fine and dandy but I didn’t want to make ALL the files & folders on my website writable. Here’s a workaround though to update your root files:

  • Create a new folder locally. I named mine ‘temp’.
  • Put the files that you want to update permissions on into that folder.
  • Upload
  • On the server, change the file permissions for the folder & make sure to include all sub files and folders. (ex 777)
  • Then in ‘remote’ or server view, move the files back into root directory.
  • Delete the temp folder.
This worked like a charm for me.