Thanks so much Cristian. I would love to be helfpful in any way to anyone that I can. I wish I had more time to spend on the forum then I currently do. I have been so busy with life in general. I am the single (for now anyway) mother of 4 and have been supporting  them alone for 9 years.  They are 22 (boy), 17(girl), 14(boy), 11(girl).  I am  preparing to move my family from Missouri to Colorado in a couple of months where I am getting  re-married(unless I turn into a complete coward! LOL)  after the first of the year. This means new husband, new home, new work environment etc. Lots of exciting and kind of scary changes. The only sad thing is my oldest son is not going. He is staying here. It's breaking my heart but he has to live his life where he is happiest the same as I do. He is working at building GDI too.

There is a great bunch of people on this forum and all so willing to help one another! It's really great because you can come here and not feel like you are disconnected from everyone.

Take care and let me know if I can be of assistance!

A person can run phpinfo on the GDI hosting and will find all the information about the currently installed version of PHP and what it will support. This does not mean that the services the version of PHP is supporting are available for use too. mySQL is not available with the hosting package and neither are many other server technologies such as ASP.NET etc.

As a "real" webmaster (I prefer webmistress actually), ,my advice is don't get bogged down in thinking you can't attract us because there is no database access or other things. Personally, when I develop my site beyond the capabilities of the GDI hosting I will just point my domain to my own nameservers and hosting services.  I have all the bells and whistles there that I need.

100 MB is a nice sized hosting space. It is more then enough for most people and many many things can be done with it, through the website builder or hosting. GDI has added a guestbook and feedback page for you in the website builder. I think that's great, it's simple and nothing fancy but it's easy to use and it's very easy to admin on the back end. There is a good product here and it comes with more emails and space then a good portion of hosting out there for 10.00/mth. It is a great value for what it is.

Getting back to attracting webmasters/webmistresses, the business opportunity itself is the attraction. Making money with a business that finally had good value for a small price tag was what appealled to me and  in an industry I understood completely was a bonus! Marketing a top level domain name is no small thing either! If a webmaster turns their back on this opportunity because the hosting isn't powerful enough for them, they are missing the boat and wouldn't do much in the business anyway. You want a webmaster/webmistress who is a business builder. Who sees a good deal for many of their clients who have small needs and sees a great opportunity for other clients to have their own domain name and make money too. If that client needs more powerful hosting, it can be provided. The beauty of GDI is that it is $10.00/month. Anyone can afford that and are getting good value for their money in comparing apples to applies in hosting. When you start adding alot of technology to the hosting package there is going to have to be a willingness to see that $10.00/month raise in price. Technology is not free. It costs money. Database servers require more security to protect information and there is always the consideration of more bandwidth unless you like your sites loading like snails. There is alot to consider. I am sure GDI is taking all this into consideration.

For me, I have been playing with the sitebuilder and with the hosting to see just what and how much can be done with it. Sometimes more can be done then people think at first, especially if they are new to web design. As I said before, for now if I need more power for my .ws site (and I am sure I will) I will just point it to my nameservers when that time comes. This opportunity is so good, even using my own servers, I still don't mind paying GDI $10.00! The marketing materials they give you with your presentation website, the movie and the backoffice you have now are worth that alone!

More powerful hosting does require more of a control panel too as someone else has mentioned. If and when GDI expands to that, that will be an added expense for them as well. It's another cost and business doesn't stay in business if they continually eat cost. It gets passed on to the customer. GDI gives us alot folks for $10.00/month.

If anyone like me gives you a hard time about the simple hosting offered here, move on and don't waste your time. Their world is too small and their vision too narrow.

All the best,
Khristi

I don't disagree with what you said at all.. However, hit counters usually log the hit when someone opens the site, click throughs are another matter.
If someone isn't getting the responsive hits or clicks they want from a website, it is  more likely is a deeper problem with the site design then scrolling or it  has to do with how the site is being promoted both on and offline.  So many people operate on the idea that "if I build it they will come and if I am selling something they will come and they will buy!". Kind of like Field of Dreams. Poor marketing can be as big or bigger issue then poor site design. .Another thing is distracting animations. Is the site too busy? Not busy enough? Scrolling down is a minor issue compared to that and as I stated before, good design and keeping screen resolution in mind along with viewable area of a site will negate that problem and resolve that issue. The average person and newbies are generally not aware of these issues.  It is good you brought the issue to light but just stating they need to break it up into pages is not enough information to help resolve the issue. My goal was to help in that endeavor. Again, plan your site, map it out, and make sure your navigation clear and will not confuse visitors. Don't disable the normal browser functions such as the back button. Your site should read like a good book and the story it tells should be in a logical order. Pages are like chapters or topics, information should be grouped appropriately.If you have all that together and still get little to no response, check your marketing plan.

Its nice to have a conversation with a fellow programmer/designer. I look forward to conversing on the board with you and everyone else as I have time.

Best,
Khristi

I am not so sure I agree that 90% of internet surfers don't scroll down.
Most user's major complaint about scrolling is over any page where you must horizontally scroll. Vertical scrolling doesn't usually bother users unless it goes on endlessly such as more then the length of two pages. These types of sites have chosen to do long listings of various information rather then separating them into appropriately titled pages. This is sloppy by design standards but viewers will scroll it if their interest has been tweeked. I do feel that with a little better planning and logical breaks in information into pages this can be avoided and give the website a more fluid and professional look and feel. I regularly read webpages where I scroll quite a bit to read an article and I don't mind scrolling down for information as I read, but, the information is generally a single article, not groupings of different topics. 
 I think people have to keep in mind what the purpose of their site is and if they are going to do it themselves, learn to plan for that purpose. As a software developer and website designer, I never just sit down and start writing code or throwing a website together. Even if I was using the site builder I would still sit and plan with paper and pencil, mapping out purpose and requirements. If I am responsible for the conent of the site as well as the design, I will make sure I have rough drafts for most if not all of it before I even determine a design.

Size is always a consideration. There is only so much viewable area in any given brower. When I design, I check and test the behavior of my sites in all major browser versions such as Firefox (which is rapidly gaining on IE in usage), IE, Opera and Netscape. For Netscape I test the current version and the  problematic version 4. I want to make sure that the site works and looks the same in them all.

There are also average viewable sizes for different screen resolutions. For instance, many users browse at an 800x600 (this in pixels)  resolution whicih gives a viewable browser size of roughly 750x420. More and more users are browsing at 1024x768. The viewable area for that is about 950x600. Generally we do our best to design within the confines of the parameters for whatever resolution we are targeting. Which one we target often depends on who the target audience is and their browsing statistics.  You never want to go wider then your target resolution viewable area because as I said before, horizontal scrolling is highly annoying to viewers. Vertical scrolling is much more natural for reading and if most have been interested enough to read what you have put in the viewable area, they will not mind scroling down to read more. In that respect, I do agree that you must capture your reader's attention and you don't have alot of time to do that. If you don't do that in the viewable area it really doesn't matter how much is down below it because they will never see it. The thing is, in light of viewable area and screen resolution, if you think about it, someone browsing at 800x600 is going to have less viewable area and will definitely scroll vertically more then someone at a higher resolution. Throw in a persons monitor size and you have more variables in determining how much scrolling someone will have to do. This is why most designers try to stick to standards and design for a specific target resolution.

I have not played around with the sitebuilder very much, I have been too busy with rock band and magician sites to play with it much. I also do much of my design work as full  Flash sites  rather then html because of who my clients are. My feeling about the site builder  is that if you chose a template you liked and carefully planned your content you should not have much trouble with excessive scrolling. You can also do as I do, besides testing in various browsers, change your monitor resolutions to various settings such as 800x600 and 1024x768 and test to see whether it forces horizontal scrolling and how much vertical scrolling is involved. Check other people's sites out at different resolutions to get an idea of what I mean. I did test a page of my site with the site builder at an 800x600 resolution and found there to be no horizontal scrolling and a small amount of vertical scrolling, so using the site builder should make this a non issue for folks.
The sitebuilder allows you six pages of content which is quite a bit of space to get said what most people need too. My brother did his site for his lawnmower business all by himself and he is about as non-technical as they come. If he can do it anyone can.

Just plan and use common sense about the length of the pages. Don't be afraid of some vertical scrolling and avoid horizontal scrolling and things will be fine.

Alot of what I said, may seem a bit overwhelming to some, but please don't let it. The sitebuilder helps you avoid many of the pitfalls of web design. If you are not using the sitebuilder and building it yourself there are many of us who can help you with that. The only thing I would ask, is that if you do ask for my help or opinion please understand I will be completely honest.  I am not one to say something looks good if I do not think it does. I do not however, say critical things in order to hurt people's feelings. It is only so they can have a better looking website and learn. Web design is not easy and there is a lot to it. I think I have learned many of my lessons the hard way and have had more then a few tell me some of what I did looked terrible. I am still growing and learning my craft. There is a balance between marketer and web designer that must be reached. As a designer there are many things I can do but that doesn't mean I should, I have to keep in mind the needs and purpose of the site. Marketers on the other hand, have some pretty strange ideas about web design. Some of their worst ideas are "popup windows" or disabling the back button so a user must close the browser to escape their site or type a previous address into the address bar to get where they were. If you want to annoy visitors, do those two things or place alot of flashy animated gifs to draw attention to parts of your site. I prefer the KISS method of doing things and not annoying visitors. I know if it would annoy me, I won't do it to a site visitor. This last part is just my opinion and you can take it for it what it's worth or leave it.

If I can be of assistance to anyone let me know even though I am booked pretty heavily at the moment with three websites approaching deadlines. Sorry if this was a bit long winded. If I didn't say some of it very well, forgive me, I just got home from a trip that included long hours of driving. Regardless of any incoherent rambling,, I hope this info is at least somewhat helpful to people.

Khristi