Very fine web design, hosting & tools

I discovered the web design templates of Andreas Viklund when I first looked at the web site of Stefanie Sendelbach, an English/Chinese to German translator, who used one to create a pleasant, harmonious site to describe her professional services. I was impressed by his modern formats and clean (= easy to maintain) HTML code, so I looked through the collection and chose one as the basis for the long-delayed rewrite and translation of our company web site.

The template pages make excellent use of stylesheets and are easy to adapt for multi-lingual and multi-path navigation. The one I chose is a sort of multiple column news format, quite different than any page design I've worked with before, with a lot of special elements like highlighting boxes and unique menus. I like it. I'm curious to see if anyone else does when I relaunch the site.

For site editing and maintenance I chose the free Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition. I used to program a lot with Visual Studio, so the environment is a very comfortable one for me to work with, and the price is right.

I've also decided to migrate to a new provider later this year, because I've grown very dissatisfied with ProZ's hosting. The mail server intermittently and inexplicably refuses to allow various mail accounts access, with the problems lasting anywhere from minutes to days. Appeals to ProZ support have gotten to no good solution. But that isn't what irks me most. We are busy translators who get a lot of mail with large attachments from our clientele and strangers. The space allocation for the "advanced hosting" package simply isn't enough, and several times we've collected so much mail in a few days that the mailboxes are nearly full. All requests to support to sell me more file space have been ignored, and I'm simply not going to chase the company with my money if it's not wanted. A BDÜ colleague recommended ALL-INKL.DE, and I am very pleased with my experiences with that company so far. I won't deal with the heavyweight on the German market, 1&1, because of our very bad experiences with them as an ISP in the past.