Technophobe question – domain names and webmail

Discussion in 'Yellow Pages' started by CYHSYF, Oct 8, 2017.

  1. CYHSYF

    CYHSYF Academy Graduate

    Hi, as some of you may know I am on the committee of Watford Ladies FC (not to be confused with Watford FC Ladies!) and been tasked with updating our website.

    Our current website www.watfordladiesfc.com is in urgent need of overhaul, it was set up by someone who left the club ages ago and who is not contactable, it has a load of old and incorrect information and is frankly a mess and we are unable to edit some of the pages / sections for some reason.

    So we’ve been looking at using a drag and drop free website provided by Club Website (www.clubwebsite.co.uk) to replace it, the downside is they put 3rd party ads on the website, the upside is it’s free and relatively easy to update, lots of girls clubs in the area are using it. Club Website say we can transfer our current URL over to them so that the new website will still be www.watfordladiesfc.com.

    All our club officials also have an @watfordladiesfc.com email address which is a gmail email account which I believe may be connected to the website setup. To update the old website we had to log in using joe.bloggs@watfordladiesfc.com as user name and then the password.

    I am pretty clueless when it comes to web technology and my big worry is that if we transfer our URL over to the new Club Website one this will bugger up our email system. I’m not entirely sure what a ‘domain name’ entails but pretty certain this is not just the URL address and there are other things that could be affected.

    Are we better off going with a different URL for the new website which will mean it is entirely separate from our email system and would we then be able to kill off the old .com website while still retaining our email?

    I do realise we could invest some money in getting somebody in who actually knows how to do this stuff but since the parting of the ways with Watford FC we are keen to channel as much of our funds as possible into the football side so that as many girls as possible can play.

    Sorry if this is bleedin obvious to somebody with a techy background and would appreciate any advice or pointers – cheers, CYHSYF
     
  2. Godfather

    Godfather bricklayer extraordinaire

    Not a techie but I doubt your G-mail account is bothered if you change (or add alternative) log-in details so long as the new domain is valid. Club Website should be able to put you straight on this, why not ask them?
    I'd say go with a new URL but try and get the old one linked to it, once again Club website should be able to help. This should help when your club is searched for.
     
    Last edited: Oct 8, 2017
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  3. Diamond

    Diamond First Team

    I believe the club paid google to manage the @watfordfcladies.com domain email addresses as they were very careful about how many they gave out to coaches. I would say your first port of call would be to contact google and see what the setup is and how easy it is to transfer over to new hosts.

    The bloke who set it all up is a friend of mine on facebook since our Watford Ladies days and currently active on there. If you want me to get some contact details off him I can certainly try.

    Running a site with ads if it makes it easier to run is a definite yes. As you say, many of the girls clubs use them and if you put in the time and effort then they can be made to be very good looking and informative.
     
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  4. Arakel

    Arakel First Team

    It's highly unlikely transferring your site to the new host will cause issues with the email routing. I just looked up your MX record for watfordladiesfc.com and it points to Google.

    As long as your new host only updates A records or CNAME records relating to your site, I doubt you'll see any repercussions. The important thing is to not change the MX record info - that's your mail exchanger informaiton.

    My guess is the host wants you to update the A record for the WWW entry for watfordladiesfc.com to point to their IP address instead of the one it currently points to.

    Don't feel bad about not understanding this stuff, it's pretty specialised knowledge.
     
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  5. Arakel

    Arakel First Team

    Ok, had some more time to look into your settings a bit.

    Looks like you have a single CNAME record that's driving your web traffic; your www record is a CNAME that points to ghs.googlehosted.com. That means your current website is hosted on Google.

    I would suggest checking to make sure that your email access isn't tied into the current hosting. While consumer Gmail accounts are free, Google also offers paid email services for business and it's not impossible a business email might have been tied up with your site hosting package. It would be worthwhile to review your settings. You generally have to pay per person per month if you have this sort of feature so chances are that you'd know if you did.

    I don't have any personal experience of using Google as a host so I can't say for certain, but I suspect from your setup that the site was configured to use Google's free email forwarding service to route the message to a Gmail account, in which case you're pretty safe.
     
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  6. CYHSYF

    CYHSYF Academy Graduate

    thanks for all the replies and for looking into it in such detail Arakel, that's much appreciated - from what you say it sounds like we should be OK on the email system but I think our Treasurer deals with the registrations so I will ask them to check what our deal is with google just to make sure before we make the jump.

    @ Diamond cheers for offering to contact M - he recruited me as the then U9s Team Manager and was really helpful getting the team going before he left, I would be able to message him also on fb if needed, just didn't want to bother him unnecessarily as he has moved on since then.

    thanks again everybody, very useful and much appreciated, cheers, CYHSYF
     
    Diamond likes this.
  7. Diamond

    Diamond First Team

    Let us know when it's up and running as I'd love to see it when updated.
     

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