[webarch-websites] Soft launch of new Webarchitects website

[Chris Croome]

Hi

We have had a couple of external reasons to launch a new
site for Webarchitects:

1. Nominet compliance, we agreed the text here with
   Nominet at the end of last year and really needed to make
   it live then:

   - https://www.webarchitects.co.uk/domain-renewal

2. HTTPS certificate expiry -- all the commercial certs
   expired on Saturday 6th 2016 and to save a fair amount of
   money we wanted to switch to Let's Encrypt certs.

So due to the above we launched the new site on Friday:

- https://www.webarchitects.co.uk/

Some pages still need more work on the content and I hit
the Let's Encrypt beta limit of 5 certs per TLD per week
before I got all the domain names right, so for the moment
there is an issues if the site is accessed without a www,
but this should be resolveable next week.

I had to get a new commercial cert for
https://stats.webarch.net/ (some work is needed on the
Apache config to get the logo working).

The Ecohost site was also replaced with the Webarchitects
site, but set to have a different front page:

- https://ecohost.coop/

And the plan, for after half term, is to probably do the
same for Ecodissident.

We have updated all the packages and prices on the site
but haven't quite got a new shared hosting server ready to
host anyone wanting to a new site, but hopefully I'll get
the last few issues resolved in the next week. The old
prices have been archived here:

- https://docs.webarch.net/wiki/Packages_2012-2015

The plan is to have the AGM before we ask anyone using any
existing services to pay for things based on the new
prices.

So, the launch was a "soft launch",

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_launch

because of the issues above, but after half term, when we
have the next AGM date set, we should post of lists and
Twitter etc to announce the new site / prices etc. 

Hope all the above is OK with people -- myself, Adam and
Jonathan have been working on this site for several months
and as people know we have been meaning to launch a new
site with new prices (we lose money on everything, apart
from hourly work, with the old prices) for several years
and it is good to finally have it out there, though we are
not quite ready to shout about it yet...

Please feel free to post any feedback to this list.

All the best

Chris

-- 
Chris Croome                               <chris at webarchitects.co.uk>
web design                             http://www.webarchitects.co.uk/ 
web content management                               http://mkdoc.com/