Web Hosting Blog | Lunarpages Lunartics » Mitch Keeler

Magento Hosting Comes to Lunarpages

Mitch — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:53:23 +0000

As a professional and open-source e-commerce solution, Magento is offering your online store access to unprecedented flexibility and control. You can also get it up and running here with Lunarpages, if you are using one of our new LPCP controlled accounts.

What Makes Magento So Great?

Where Magento really shines is it’s modular architecture. It really puts the control of the online business back in the hands of the shop owner. Any online merchant out there today would be silly to second guess this terrific script’s abilities of getting the job done. Many people who have grown tired of other shopping carts systems have migrated towards Magento because of functionality and delivery, which are two areas where Magento outshines the competition.

At Lunarpages, you can install Magento on any LPCP powered hosting account, either by a manual install or via the LPCP’s WebApps instant script installer. Your choice. Our cPanel powered plans do not support the backend needed yet to host Magento.

Need Help? Check out our profile page on Magento in the web hosting wiki. The third-party scripts and services section of the Lunarforums should also come in handy if you run into a problem. There is also a demo of Magento featured on OpensourceCMS’s web site.

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

Keep watching the Lunartics blog all throughout the month on November for even more third-party script suggestions, tutorials, tips and more. You can also get tons of information and details about just a handful of the third-party scripts we support on the web hosting wiki. We also have a special forum dedicated to third-party script discussions over at the Lunarforums. Subscribe today to the Lunartics RSS feed for instant updates when we release a new script suggestion!

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Create Your Own .htaccess with LPCP

Mitch — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:18:58 +0000

Over the past year or so, a lot of people have enjoyed the write-up on how to create your own .htaccess file from within cPanel, so I figured I would give the same sage words of advice for everybody out there using the LPCP control panel.

To create a .htaccess file in LPCP, log into the LPCP, and then go to your File Manager. Click on the text link labeled, ” public_html” to navigate yourself inside the public_html folder.

Now, in the empty text box to your upper-right type in .htaccess, make sure the drop down box is set to “File” and then hit the button labeled, “Create”.

Your .htaccess file will be created in your public_html folder on your LPCP powered account.

Find out how to manually create and upload the .htaccess file to your web hosting account!

For more LPCP help, tips, tutorials and more, be sure to check out the web hosting wiki. Over 340 guides have been published there to help you get more out of your web hosting account at Lunarpages.

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Hosting with osCommerce

Mitch — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:20:15 +0000

One of the most widely used shopping cart scripts out there is osCommerce. It gives the shop owner an open-source online e-commerce solution. You might have already known that, however did you know a number of our web hosting plans come with a way to get it installed in a single click? Lunarpages is a great provider of osCommerce web hosting.

You can easily install the osCommerce script by doing so in cPanel’s Fantastico, LPCP’s WebApps or by downloading it and installing it manually. The manual install option might be tedious to some. That is why I am so excited to see we can give you an easier way to install from the cPanel or LPCP control panels.

Can you extend osCommerce? Yes, you can. This e-commerce hosting script supports add-ons. Add-ons are extra scripts and services you can install to give your e-commerce business extra tools, a new appearance, or a number of new features the basic script does not provide.

The official osCommerce web site delivers multiple ways to try the script or see web sites using the script.

Visit the Demonstrations page for online demonstrations.
Visit the Live Shops Directory site for a list of worldwide online shops powered by osCommerce.

osCommerce is a great feature rich tool, which provides out-of-the-box shopping cart functionality and style. If you are looking for the perfect osCommerce hosting plan, you might check out the extra benefits the Business hosting plan offers.

You can find more how-to articles in our web hosting wiki. The third-party scripts and services section of the Lunarforums should also come in handy if you run into a problem.

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

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E-Commerce Hosting with Zen Cart

Mitch — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:45:09 +0000

The free, user-friendly and open source shopping cart software, Zen Cart is perfect for any e-commerce web site hosted at Lunarpages. With the thoughts of shop owners, programmers, designers and more in mind, Zen Cart is one of the best third-party shopping cart scripts out there.

You can easily install Zen Cart one of three ways. We give the option to install manually, through LPCP’s WebApps page or cPanel’s Fantastico page. The process is simple, straight forward and to the point.

If you need to see example of Zen Cart powered web sites, you can check out Zen Cart’s showcase page. OpenSourceCMS.com also has a hosted demo of the shopping cart script on it’s web site.

Here are a few more Zen Cart tutorials that should come in handy:

You can find more how-to articles in our web hosting wiki. The third-party scripts and services section of the Lunarforums should also come in handy if you run into a problem.

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

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PHPlist Hosting with Lunarpages

Mitch — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:13:11 +0000

One of the world’s best open-source newsletter managers can be installed a number of different ways, here at Lunarpages. PHPlist is a free script that will handle all your newsletter or mailing lists for you. It is downloaded over 10,000 tie per month – and is possibly one of the most popular open-source scripts out there today.

PHPlist is fully installable via cPanel’s Fantastico, the LPCP WebApps, or by downloading it and installing it manually. Here are a few more features that it includes:

double opt-in subscription mechanism
scheduling
RSS
list segmentation
click-tracking
attachments
bounce management

Here are a few more tutorials on PHPlist to help you out:

To learn more about PHPlist, be sure to check out their official web site, the support page for PHPlist and the official PHPlist documentation. If you need anymore help – you can always turn towards the Lunarforums too:

Lunarforums – Third Party Scripts and Services Forum

It is easy to see why PHPlist is possibly the best mailing list script out there.

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

Keep watching the Lunartics blog all throughout the month on November for even more third party script suggestions, tutorials, tips and more. You can also get tons of information and details about just a handful of the third party scripts we support on the web hosting wiki. We also have a special forum dedicated to third party script discussions over at the Lunarforums. Subscribe today to the Lunartics RSS feed for instant updates when we release a new script suggestion!

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7 Reasons to Love the New Intel Core i7 Dedicated Hosting Plan

Mitch — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:05:24 +0000

Lunarpages is not only a leader in the shared and VPS hosting world, they are also a juggernaut when it comes to dedicated hosting servers too. The newest member to the dedicated hosting plan family is the new i7 Dedicated hosting plan. What is so special? I am going to give you seven reasons you will love the new Intel Core i7 hosting from Lunarpages.

The Intel® Core™ i7 2.66ghz CPU is the most recent technology from Intel® providing faster, intelligent, multi-core technology that applies processing power where it’s needed most.
Also included are 3GB of DDR3 RAM, the best memory you could ever want or need in a dedicated hosting server.
With 2000 GB of bandwidth, you are ready for any Internet traffic storm that might come your way.
250 GB of storage is included, with room to grow if needed. You’ll never have to worry about disk space again.
Coming in at only $245 per month, I’m not sure if this would fall under the deal or the steal category.
As with our other dedicated hosting plan, 2 GB are included and dedicated to backup storage.
With 2 IP addresses, SSH, MySQL Databases, E-Commerce Tools, and more, what is not to love with this dedicated hosting offer?

Every dedicated hosting plan from Lunarpages also comes with the unparalleled security, control and management options you need. If you are looking to upgrade to a dedicated hosting plan – or get your first, there is no better dedicated hosting platform out there today.

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SMF Web Hosting at Lunarpages

Mitch — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:46:18 +0000

Possibly one of the best forum scripts out there to date, Simple Machines Forum, is more than welcome to be hosted here at Lunarpages, on many of our web hosting plans. It is a free, professional grade software package that will have you setup with your own online community in just seconds.

How to Install SMF? – Simple Machine Forum comes with both cPanel’s Fantastico and LPCP’s WebApps collections, respectfully. You are also more than able to download the installation package from SMF’s official site, and install it yourself.

How to Install SMF Manually

Mods, Themes and Upgrades… oh my! – SMF, like many third party scripts we provide to you, comes ready, willing and able to handle a number of different plugins, or as they call them “modifications”. These mods will add features, remove features and many more possibilities. SMF is also no stranger to customized themes either. You can browse through their directory of themes, or design your own. The forum script is also very well written, and is kept up to date, as soon as a security (or any other) flaw arises.

More SMF Tutorials and Help

Here are a few more SMF tutorials, tips and more we have collected:

For more information, and help – be sure to check out the web hosting wiki.

Want to play with it, before you install it, yourself? Play with the demo that is hosted over at OpenSourceCMS.

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

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Get Your Joomla Hosting on at Lunarpages

Mitch — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:54:21 +0000

The award winning content management system, which enables you to build web sites and powerful online applications is more than welcome at Lunarpages. Joomla is all that, and so much more. For people looking for an easy to use and powerful script to manage their digital empire, Joomla is a good way to go.

At Lunarpages, you have three ways you can get this script installed. It comes standard with cPanel’s Fantastico, LPCP’s WebApps collection or you could manually install the script too.

Extensions & Themes – Like some of the other scripts we have mentioned, it comes ready to support a number of extensions that will build upon an already solid script. You can browse through some of the best at extensions.joomla.org. At the time of writing this, they have over 3,537 to choose from. A simple search for “Joomla themes” in Google will give you many choices for slick designs you can use to get your own web site up and running.

Need Joomla Help? You can always turn towards our wonderful web hosting wiki for Joomla help, as well as our user forums. Here are a couple of more places to look for support:

Want to give it a shot? OpenSourceCMS has a great demo hosted, that will let you play with the Joomla interface, without needing to install it.

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

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Save $60 on Quicksite Hosting

Mitch — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:48:44 +0000

Here to help you save some cash (because the holidays are coming up quick!) Lunarpages has done it again with another fantastic offer. For a limited time only, you can grab your own Quicksite hosting plan for only $9.95 per month, if you sign up for the 12 month billing term. Just think about it, you could get that web site you’ve always wanted in under two hours with the Quicksite hosting plan.

A Unique Web Hosting Experience – Not only do we give you the web hosting, we also give you the tools. The Quicksite hosting plan comes with a top of the line, online web page editor. This tool can only be found at Lunarpages, and will allow you to create, edit or add to your web site anywhere, and at anytime.

We have discussed before, how the three-step publishing process works, but if you need more information check out our guide about it here.

Here are a few more interesting links:

So if you have been hesitant to check out the Quicksite hosting plan before, you’ll have no worries now. You get to save $60! You could practically get another hosting plan with those savings. It’s a limited time offer, so act fast!

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Vanilla Web Forum Hosting at Lunarpages

Mitch — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:29:26 +0000

Lunarpages fully supports the lightweight and simple Vanilla forum script. What is Vanilla? It is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, fully extensible discussion forum for the Web.

While it is not supported via the cPanel’s Fantastico or LPCP’s WebApps manager, the script is simple enough for anybody to download, setup and install in minutes. For more help on the install process, check out this quick guide I wrote up for the Lunarpages web hosting wiki.

Addons Galore – One of Vanilla’s big strengths is the fact that is supports a number of awesome addons to extend the script even further. Via their addon page, you can check out a number of themes, plugins and applications available for your own Vanilla message board installation.

Browse Through the Most Popular Addons for Vanilla!

Want to take the script out for a test drive? Check out the demo features on OpenSourceCMS to take a look at both the front end and the back-end of this fantastic forum script.

For more Vanilla support and help – be sure to check out:

Vanilla Help, Tutorials and More on the Web Hosting Wiki

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

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Save $72 on Business Hosting at Lunarpages

Mitch — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:25:21 +0000

For a limited time only, we are dropping the price for our e-commerce enabled juggernaut of a web hosting plan, the Business hosting plan, to $18.95 per month, if you sign up for a new 24 month plan. How much money will that save you? It cuts the price, and save you $72 – automatically.

The Business web hosting plan is the perfect hosting plan for any business or e-commerce web site out there today. Not only does it come with unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth, it also provides to you features you will get with no other web host out there today.

What are these special Lunarpages features?

You can register 3 domain names for free
You get a Free Dedicated SSL Certificate
You have access to a free Dedicated IP Address
Instant Access to a Personalized TremenDesk Help Desk

These are Lunarpages originals, as far as special offers go – and no other web host out there today, can offer you the same.

To learn more about the Business web hosting plan, be sure to check out the official Lunarpages web site page about the plan, and if you have any questions – our sales specialist are available around the clock to answer your concerns. Just e-mail them at sales@lunarpages.com.

Your business and e-commerce hosting solutions live here, with Lunarpages.

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Get bbPress Hosting at Lunarpages

Mitch — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:37:12 +0000

Yesterday, we took a look at WordPress, so today I figured we would check out it’s message board (and less popular) brother from another mother, bbPress. Forum software can often be slow, bloated and filled with holes – however bbPress is the total opposite. The focus is around being easy to use, speedy, and compliant with all the web standards.

Just Like WordPress, for Message Boards…

The install process is pretty straight forward for anybody who has ever installed a basic script before. You download, you configure, you install on your hosting account. Just like WordPress, it too comes with a number of plugins to extend the functionality and performance.

Here are just a handful of tutorials to help you get stated with bbPress:

You can find more bbPress help on our web hosting wiki.

Want to try it out before you install? Go try out the demo hosted over on OpenSourceCMS. They’ll let you play with both the front end and the back-end of the message board script.

Overall, if you are familiar with WordPress, and you are looking for a way to add forums to your web site hosted with Lunrapages, bbPress is worth checking out. It is not as feature rich as some of the other forum scripts out there, however it definitely gets the job done.

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

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WordPress Hosting at Lunarpages

Mitch — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:22:19 +0000

All this month, on the Lunartics blog, we will highlight some of our favorite third-party scripts. From image galleries to message boards, there will be a little something for everybody. To get things started, I thought I would discuss with you why WordPress is my absolute favorite blogging script.

WordPress truly is a state-of-the-art publishing platform that is easy enough for anybody to use. It focuses on aesthetics, web standards and real usability. Also, since it is totally free to use, that makes it even better.

WordPress is Easy to Install

At Lunarpages, you can easily install WordPress via cPanel or the LPCP control panels, so that gives you instant access. If you would rather install the script yourself, you can do that too using WordPress’s world famous five-minute install.

The Extras for WordPress are Awesome

As far as extras go, you can not overlook the WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.

Plugins – You can bring up how great WordPress is, without mentioning the slew of plugins that people developed for it. You can easily install plugins from the WordPress administrator interface (after you have it installed) or browse though all the plugins available at WordPress Plugins Directory.

Themes – There are many themes you can choose from too. The world greatest designers have really given it their all to give you some great looking designs. You can browse though many of them at the WordPress Theme Directory, or even build your own theme to use.

For more help with WordPress, be sure to check out our web hosting wiki page dedicated to this great blogging script.

WordPress Help, Tutorials and Tips on the Web Hosting Wiki!

Also, try the WordPress demo over at OpenSourceCMS to play with the administrator interface.

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

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How to Get Started with an Affiliate Plan

Mitch — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:25:42 +0000

Everybody likes to get paid cold hard cash for giving their opinion on who the greatest web host out there really is, right? The Lunarpages affiliate plan will pay you big bucks, just for referring new clients over to Lunarpages.

Need some help to get you started? Here are six great tutorials that cover just about every aspect of the Lunarpages Affiliate program.

What is the Affiliate Program?

Working as a referral service, the Lunarpages affiliate plan will award you with cash, just for spreading the word about Lunarpages web hosting to your friends, family, clients and coworkers…

Direct Affiliate Traffic to Specific URLs

Through our money making affiliate plan, anyone can send new clients to Lunarpages, and get paid for their efforts. However, many affiliate plan members want to be able to point their unique affiliate links to specific pages inside of Lunarpages.com…

How to Create an Affiliate Advertising Campaign

An affiliate advertising campaign can be a great way to track how successful an affiliate link, a banner page, or a specific page is performing for your affiliate plan. The Lunarpages affiliate plan fully supports campaign tracking…

Payments for Lunarpages Affiliates

Once you have reached the minimum commission limit (or have gone over it) each Lunarpages affiliate plan member will be issued a check send to the address we have on record for your affiliate plan…

Qualified Affiliate Plan Commissions

Each time a new customer signs up through your Lunarpages affiliate plan link, you are awarded a commission for the sale through our web hosting affiliate program. However, some might have questions about the commission process, so I wanted to explain it fully to you here…

Tax Forms for Affiliate Plan Users

Once you sign up for the Lunarpages affiliate plan, you will need to send us the needed tax documentation before we can send payment to you…

Need some extra holiday cash? Referring your friends, family members or business partners is an excellent way to get the job done. For more help with the Lunarpages affiliate program, and how to get started, check out the Lunarpages Affiliate Program web site.

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Keep Your WordPress Plugins Up To Date

Mitch — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:53:24 +0000

Keeping your plugins up to date is one of the most important things you can do after you have installed WordPress. For security reasons, and reasons of functionality you always want to make sure you are running the latest and greatest version of each – and here is how you can get it done quickly, through the WordPress administrator interface.

First thing, go to the Plugins page from within the WordPress admin interface.

Next, find the plugins that need to be updated. As you can see from the picture above, we only have one. On the Manage Plugins page, scroll down till you find the one that is highlighted, like this:

Click the, “upgrade automatically” link to upgrade the plugin from within WordPress. Your WordPress install then should upgrade the plugin in question, once complete – it’ll ask you to return to the plugin page. You are done. Now your plugin is updated.

How many plugins should you install? In most cases, I would suggest you keep your plugin number under ten. Also, you should check for updates early and often, because when plugins are updated they are often giving you new features, or updating security issues.

For more WordPress help, be sure to check out the web hosting wiki!

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Free Flash Template Designs from Lunarpages

Mitch — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:29:33 +0000

Want to get a free flash design template with your next web hosting plan? The team over at Flash Template Designs and Lunarpages have teamed up to deliver you an out of this world deal.

If you use the coupon code FTD30 when you purchase a 12 or 24 month NEW hosting plan with Lunarpages and get a $30 discount on your web hosting. What type of template will you get? You can browse around the Flash Template Design web site to get an idea of the type of free flash layouts you will have to choose from. How do you get started?

Simply click here to purchase your web hosting, use the coupon code FTD30 when you purchase a 12 or 24 month Lunarpages Hosting plan.
After your account is active with Lunarpages for 30 days, email them (select the “info” category) and quote the domain name on the new account we are hosting for you.
They will email you your download link for the template of your choice (Up to $60 value) for FREE!

This is by far one of the best web hosting deals you can get your hands on.

Please Note: This promotion is only for NEW 12+ month Lunarpages web hosting plans and excludes Email, Domain and Starter Plans.

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Free, Customizable Flash Image Viewer

Mitch — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:54:57 +0000

Need a simple flash gallery tool? Look no further than SimpleViewer. It can take any bundle of online photos and make it into a gallery that somebody could spend hours upon hours browsing through.

This free online script will allow you to have a beautiful flash-powered image gallery in no time at all. This is a great free script for any photographers who wish to highlight their own pictures, or artists who want to show off their most recent creations.

Here are some of the features:

Intelligent image pre-loading.
Intuitive image navigation
Lightweight (17k).
Customizable interface – Set text color, frame color and width, navigation position.
Resizable interface – Interface scales to fit browser window.
Cross platform – Windows/Macintosh/Linux (requires Flash 8 or higher).

Check out some of the examples here:

Hi-Res Example – Full-browser, no captions.
Lo-Res Example – Full-browser, captions, background image.
Small Format Example - Embedded in HTML page.

Want to give it a shot? You can learn more about this great free script over at SimpleViewer.net. It is free to use, and if you like it – you could always purchase the pro version for a few more perks and services.

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Save Bandwidth, Shrink That Style Sheet!

Mitch — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:51:28 +0000

Depending on how many notes or messy modifications you make to your cascading style sheets, you might be about due for a little compression. By shrinking you external CSS files, you can save the bandwidth it takes to download them, each time somebody visits your web site.

Now how much optimization should you do? Well, the CSS files should be small enough to load quickly, however readable enough to where you know what does what where, and why. You have to balance size with readability.

Here are my three favorite online tools to help optimize and shrink my CSS files:

By using any of these three solutions, you can reduce the CSS code size and make your web pages load faster. They all allow you to choose from multiple degrees of compression, and they are all very quick too.

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Measure a Domain’s SEO Juice Levels

Mitch — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:59:18 +0000

There are a lot of tools out there to help you see how well you are doing via the search engines out there, but few do it as completely as RankBuzz. This online tool not only gives you your Google PageRank, but also provides your Alexa rank, thumbnail, whois information, index pages, social links, on site information and even how much your web site is worth.

Each section of the web page review will also give you advice or feedback on how well you are doing. For example, blog.lunarpages.com has a Google PageRank of 6 – so they told me:

Your pagerank is going great! But we’re sure there is some room for improvement. Why not try and get some higher pagerank backlinks?

So as you can see, it does a good job at trying to help you too.

This is definitely a nice site to keep bookmarked, so that you can keep tabs on how well (or not so well) your domain is doing out there on the Web. You can check it out at RankBuzz.com.

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Simple 3 Step Web Site Publishing

Mitch — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:57:08 +0000

It has been a while since we had a look at the LPQuicksite hosting plan, so I thought I would show you how you can get your website built in 2 hours or less with our fantastic publishing tools. A lot of you might think the simple three step process is more of a sales slogan than a way of how things are done, and that could not be any further from the truth. Let me show you the three steps it takes to get your web site up and running with the fantastic LPQuicksite hosting plan.

It all starts here. Once you login, you are given a very simple menu that gives you the three steps so you can simply get the job done. Step number one, is to choose from one of the 500+ templates we provide. Step number two, is to edit your web site content, and decide what you want to have displayed there. Step three, and the final step, is to simply publish. No tool out there makes it easier.

Start things off by choosing the web site design you wish to use. As mentioned before, we offer well over 500 different ones to choose from. You can also search through them by keyword, or by categories.

Edit your content. This is the step where all the magic happens, and your web site really starts to come together. Click on, “Manage Pages” setup your first page, and save it. Publishing the pages are as simple of an act as working with any word processor program out there today. We give you a fully functional WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface to design each page to meet your needs.

Publish your web site. You are done, and by publishing – you can push the changes you have made out there to the “live” version of your web site on the Web. Now your clients, visitors, family members and whomever else might be browsing your site can see your perfectly managed and well organized content.

Do you see how simple that was? Making things simpler is far from just a slogan with Lunarpages, it is a way of life. If you want to try out the demo of LPQuicksite yourself, you can do so here. With Lunarpages, even your quick and simple web site publishing solutions reside here.