New to HostGator

[kiaaa]

Lately, I have been trying to make some improvements to my website for my organization/association and make it a little more modern, however the web host we were using (ZyWeb) was very limiting and restrictive. It was also a foreign company, so there were additional costs, and virtually no access to help without waiting days for a response to an email. I did a lot of research and discovered that the web host, HostGator, had a good reputation and many people like it. They also have 24/7/365 email/phone/live chat support which has been very nice. So, we transferred the domain over to HostGator. The transfer went through on Monday, and I began making a temporary splash page so that it didn’t just have standard HostGator info on our page.

HostGator operates through cPanel and has two site builder programs with it (Site Studio and Site Builder). Both site builders are similar to what we had before with ZyWeb and don’t really give us what we were looking for – which was making the website look more modern. Host Gator also has over 4,500 templates available, however those do not work in Site Studio/Site Builder. HostGator recommended a few free programs (Nvu and KompoZer, both are identical) that we could use to edit their templates. There are several templates that we are interested in that would give the site the more modern feel that we’re looking for. So I downloaded one of the templates and opened it in KompoZer. It opened fine, and I could edit some of the text – just body text in text boxes. I cannot edit the text in some places though. For example, the menu bar. It has different tabs: Home, News, Events, Services, Support, Contacts. There are several that I would like to change the text in – for example, change Support to About Us. I would like to change these types of things to customize it to make it relevant to the association. However, all of these files are saved as image files, not just an image with a text box on it. HostGator told me that they were probably designed in Photoshop, and if I opened them in Photoshop, they would have different layers. I could go to the text layer, change the text, save it and re-insert it into Kompozer. Unfortunately, we do not have Photoshop and don’t have the $600 to spend on it. We weren’t anticipating how difficult it would be to use one of the templates before we switched. I was told that there are free programs that could open the images in the layer format and could do the same thing as Photoshop, obviously on a much more basic scale. I downloaded GIMP and Paint.net. Both programs open the images and have a box for Layers, but the only layer listed is Background. When I uncheck that, the whole thing disappears.

We basically want to use one of HostGator’s modern templates, and build the site from it. We’re just having a few glitches editing some things and getting everything up and running. The nice part is that once we get the basics edited – the menu bars, tabs, titles of boxes, etc., we really wouldn’t ever have to do that again. It would be the more basic things like changing text/information, adding links, pictures, etc., to the existing pages. Our question is – Do you have any experience in any of this type of web page design/web hosting/editing? Do you have any tips for us that could help us out?