Dear Dr. Website®: I'm looking for alternatives and solutions to propose to my employer. After a few years of hard work, many of my colleagues and I have built successful Web sites that are hosted by a number of private Web hosts. Now our college district is asking us to put all our sites under its umbrella. We are concerned with the following:
- We will lose the traffic we have worked to build.
- We will compromise the freedom to innovate we enjoy with the private vendors.
- It will simply become more difficult to find our sites.
Are we justified in thinking this, or can we simply transfer our URLs to this new host and enjoy the same success?
This is a complex issue, for a number of reasons.
I assume from the way you say "my colleagues and I" that you all work for this college district. Depending on your level of employment and contract with the district, it may be that they technically own all rights to any intellectual property you create while working for them, whether related to your employment or not. Obviously, it is to your (and anyone's) advantage not to get involved in that sort of contract in the first place. If this is the case, you're out of luck, whether moving your sites is a good idea or not. But let's assume that's not the case so we'll have something more to talk about.
If your Web sites are related to your employment, then without an agreement, the matter can still be complex legally. Suppose, for instance, that you're a biology teacher who's created a site that shows students what's inside a frog without having to dissect it. This site might be "successful" simply because it's getting a lot of hits, or it might also be considered successful because it leads the way for developing a number of software products that could be extremely lucrative. If there's enough money involved, some school administrators might attempt to coerce you into giving up your own intellectual rights to such a site out of greed, whether they're entitled to do so or not.
If that's the problem in your case, I suggest you research the history of Gatorade and then get yourself a good intellectual property lawyer. A lot may depend on whether or not you developed the site on "company time" using their equipment. If you did this on your own time and computer, you may be very glad you used a private Web host as well!
If your situation with the district isn't nearly this problematic, you could point out to them that you developed these sites on your own and want to keep them running properly, and it might make the most sense for the "official" school sites to simply point to these off-site sites. Of course, if the sites you developed already appear to be "official school sites," you'd have less of a leg to stand on morally or legally.
Now we can cover the other issues, which will apply to many readers thinking about moving their sites from one hosting provider to another. If you own your own domain name, you are in fine shape from the technical point of view. Anyone who knows how to run and configure a Web server can set up your domain so that it can be hosted from the new server instead of your old server.
Then get a file-for-file copy of your entire Web site and transfer it to the new server (let's say the one run by your college district). Then contact your domain registrar (probably Network Solutions) and have it change your server information. For this you'll need the IP address of your new server as well as two DNS servers, which you get from the provider. Leave the old site running until the new one is fully operational, and in a few days, all traffic will be invisibly routed to the new server.
If you don't own your own domain, and you're using an ISP account, then your site address probably looks something like http://www.yourisp.com/~youraccount/, which means that as soon as you leave that ISP, your hard-won traffic will indeed disappear forever. The only alternatives are to pay the ISP to leave a "forwarding address" for some number of months--which will automatically forward any requests for pages in your previous account to your new address--or simply to heave a big sigh and resubmit your site to all the search engines, while resubmitting your old URLs to the same search engines, which will wipe out the old addresses so people won't keep getting directed there.
You could also keep your old account around for awhile and put big notices on all the pages saying that you'll soon be moving, and to where. In any case, you now know why owning your own domain (sometimes called a "virtual domain" by Web hosting providers) is so important.
Dear Dr. Website®:
How are you able to make links that change color upon mouseover? I have visited numerous sites and am unable to derive and understand the HTML of this. Also, can you provide sample source code for both the text mouseover and a sublink mouseover so that when you either click on or mouse over a link, a list of sublinks will appear below, indented.
To answer your first question,
you can achieve this effect by using Style Sheets (specifying the specific colors you choose):
<STYLE>
<!--
A:hover {text-decoration:bold; color:blue;}
A:link {text-decoration:underline; color:#000099;}
-->
</STYLE>
The answer to the second question is more involved. WebReference.com has an area to get you started: http://webreference.com/dhtml.
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