As a web designer, I get asked daily for web hosting recommendations. While there are literally thousands of web hosting companies that provide excellent service, great uptime and have knowledgeable tech support, I have compiled a list of 13 hosting companies that either I use personally, have clients using or trusted associates recommend. These are companies I recommend if you are looking for hosting for your blog, small to medium size business site, online store or community.

Most of these sites feature two things - cPanel and Fantastico - both of which are requirements for ease of use in my book. cPanel is easy to navigate and loaded with features allowing you to easily check stats, set up email, create database, password protect directories, and more. Fantastico offers the fastest and most straight forward installs for more than 20 of our favorite Open Source programs and scripts like WordPress, phpBB, ZenCart, Galleries, and other utilities. For the average website owner or blogger, these features cut down on a lot of tech support/webmaster support time.

In alphabetical order the web hosting companies I recommend are: (more…)

The team at Common Craft are well known for their videos that explain high tech topics in plain English. I just watched one of their newest additions, Podcasting in Plain English, and am posting it here for you to learn from too.

Have a great weekend.

I have been doing so much blog design and customization lately, my head is beginning to spin. One of these days soon, I will share some links to my recent work. But in the meantime, how about I share links to some essential reads for the week?

• Deb at Freelance Writing Jobs asked if I would give her a guest post this month. Since her site is about writing and mine is about design, I wrote about a few of the differences in for writing for the web vs. writing for print.
• Even if you are not a non-profit, 47Media’s Non-Profit’s Guide to Websites is an excellent article.
• Dawud Miracle wants to know if Email Marketing is Dead? What’s your take?
• I like ChrisG’s post on Building Your Online Brand with Social Media Tools.
• By way of Laughing Lion Design, I found the link to 100 Photoshop Tutorials at 3D Total. Definitely bookmark-worthy.
• Pearsonified is back with a great post on How You Can Use WordPress Functions to Run a Smarter Blog. Note to self - read and re-read.
• Are you interested in buying domain names? Personally I have quite the collection and would have loved to have had this guidance earlier on. Digital Inspiration has some very sound advice on buying domains.
• Just for fun! Do you love fonts? Are you good at identifying them? Take this quick quiz from I Love Typography and see how font savvy you are.
• And while we are at it - 15 Signs You May Be a Geek. Wendy at Sparkplugging shared this link to the geek quiz and I am proud to say that we are both very geeky - a cool 13 out of 15 geek points.