Families and Clubs

The internet is a powerful thing, and with more and more people getting online, now is the time to utilise it to suit your way of life...whether it be as a family looking to share your memories or catch up with relatives all over the world, or as a club or organisation hoping to give its members even more to keep them motivated, or publish information for their reference or attention.

All of these things are possible with utilities that  are available for free, you just need to know where to find these programs and find a reliable place to host them.  SONA can help, with low cost reliable hosting with incredible features for the money, plus installation methods so simple that even adult technophobes discovering the internet for the first time can master them.

Want to show off your photos?

Ever thought about having your own online gallery where you can decide who sees your photos, how you want them arranged, how you want your gallery to look?  And what if we said you can get your friends and family to register on your gallery, view your photos, upload photos themselves if you let them and even create their own galleries?  Well take a look at two solutions, Coppermine and Photogallery.  Both are free and included in every single web hosting package that we sell together with the .uk domain name of your choice (subject to availability).  Simple to install, you can have a gallery up and running in minutes at www.whatevernameyouwant.co.uk
 
Coppermine - the online photo gallery (Click for Demo)
This is one of the most popular online photo gallery systems available that allows you to control your own gallery...because it's open source it's free and supported by a huge community at the Coppermine website.  Download themes to make it look how you want, or customise the templates yourself.  Our demo currently has a "Mac" theme applied to it...unfortunately you cannot use the admin features, but feel free to browse for some of its features.

Coppermine uses 1 MySQL database and installs in less than a minute via our Hosting Control Panel...visit the provided web link and configure your new online photo gallery!
Photo Gallery - another online photo gallery (Click for Demo)
An alternative to Coppermine,  again easily customised and styled.  Appears a little more simplistic than Coppermine which many people will feel more comfortable with.  Visit the Photo Gallery website for more details. Unfortunately you cannot use the admin features on our demo.

Want to create something even more elaborate?
SONA Web Builder (Click for Demo)
This is a working demo of the Web Builder which is included in every SONA hosting package.  Web Builder is free with every SONA hosting package and can be used to produce professional looking basic websites with relative ease.  If you want to publish a photo gallery that is open to everyone, or  create your own website then this is a great place to start.  You can have a great deal of fun with this package making things just the way you want them to look, using a template driven system that is very easy to use.  Check out the demo to see how easy it is.

How about communicating with the people whilst involving others?

PHP Bulletin Board 3 (Click for Demo)
A bulletin board or forum is essentially a place where people can talk to each other on any subject chosen by the owner.   Massively popular all over the world, bulletin boards are a great way of facilitating communication between all of your family, or for providing a medium for interaction between your members when they are away from your club or organisation.

As one of the most popular bulletin board programs available, you won't be suprised that it has a massive community of resources and themes at the PHPBB website.  We use it for our own brand new Support Forums on our site, and this demo is a link to the non-embedded version, ie.  how you would see it as a stand alone product.  We have used a custom theme called "Aeroblue" with a few modifications to the code ourselves for this forum.  Feel free to register and post any pre-sales questions you might have.

What other SONA services might you find useful?

We offer web hosting starting at £3.99 per month rising to £35.99 for the year (£3 per month) for our most basic package.  This comes with all of the above scripts and programs, plus many others, as well an a .uk domain name of your choosing.  Full details can be found under Hosting & Domains.

We also offer a web design service with prices that you may find hard to believe.  A professionally designed and maintained website is now within easy reach of the smaller budgets that individuals and clubs can afford.  Full details can be found under Web Design.

If you have any questions that aren't answered on the site, we would love to hear from you either by telephone, email or on our new forums.