The main Seattle Duck House website is now up. I spent about 8 hours getting the text written and images all set up. We picked a nice “logo” image from a search of creative commons licensed photos at flickr for mallard duck and found a great close-up photo taken by Mike Baird.
I “bought” the domain name on April 12: it is actually free when you keep the site hosted at Microsoft Office Live. They will also pay for the annual renewals. As far as I can tell, the only catch is that they put a Live Search bar in the upper left and a tiny Office Live logo in lower right. There are no ads anywhere – so it still looks very clean and professional.
Why did I pick MS Office Live? Well, I’ve always tended to cheer for the underdogs, especially when they are the home team… So, I decided to see what they had to offer – especially since it was free. I have plenty of experience writing HTML from scratch, and I’ve even tried a few other domain name and hosting services (notably godaddy.com). This is far better and easier, and I don’t feel like they’re trying to suck more and more purchases out of me.
It turns out that it really nicely integrates mail, domain name picking, website design, and web statistics. Most of the features only work with IE (but the Office Live Mail works fine on Firefox). The web design interface at Office Live was actually very pleasant and intuitive. There were a few quirky things here and there, but overall, I’ve been very pleased about the service. I can’t complain when its free. But, in reality, there’s not much to complain about for hosting a static website.
1 response so far ↓
Papa Jack // July 30, 2007 at 11:31 pm
its 2:27 AM in our nation’s Capitol and I find myself intrigued by your wonderful Duck House annals. My fiance and I were just in Seattle/Portland on business/pleasure and if we had had the time we would have loved to come by just to meet your (and maybe the “exhausted painter”)…things to do in the future along with jack the Golden Retriever. Good luck…make the world a little less anxious!!