Frequently Asked Questions
 We have an existing web address (also known as a URL or domain name) or plan to buy one. Can we use it?
Yes. We have found two ways (there may be others).
1. You can go to the website of your domain name provider and change some settings. Set your domain name to forward to your offtheblocks website (e.g., to www.offtheblocks.org/ourteam) and set masking to yes. Once these settings are activated, anyone using your purchased domain name will be forwarded to your off the blocks website. Masking will make your purchased domain name show up in the browser, not the off the blocks name. Most domain name companies make this relatively easy to do, although some charge for this service. There are two problems we have found with this solution. One is that when anyone refreshes a page on your website, they will always be taken back to the homepage. The other is that search engines typically do not find forwarded pages.
2. The second solution is to set up a separate account space for you on our server and then you can point your domain name to this special account. There are no unusual problems we have found with this solution, however, there are some setup fees. At the time of writing, set up of a separate account space is $50. This solution increases your storage space from 1 to 2 GB and we can add a few email accounts and other options to a separate account space. Some of the extra options have costs. For example, we can offer spam filtering of email, but there is a step of fee ($15) and a monthly fee of $1/email account.
Why do you limit file size on upload? I have some photos that are 5 MB and I want to put them on the website. 5 MB pictures cause a number of problems on the web. The two biggest are as follows:
1. At common local download speeds, a 5 MB picture will take a little
over two minutes to show up in a browser! One of the reasons for ~2
MB limit on OTB was to try to keep pictures small enough that they
would load in under a minute.
2. Auto-thumbnail software we wrote struggles thumb nailing large pictures quickly!
The reason that the photo images are so large is most likely because
they were created by a high resolution camera. They are probably over
2500 pixels wide. Printed photos should probably be 300 pixels per inch, so 2500 pixel pictures can be printed up to about 8 in by 10 in. In contrast, most people don't have monitors that can display
such large pictures. Monitors only display 72 pixels per inch and only a small percentage of monitors display images wider than 1200 pixels.
So the best thing to do with large photos is to resize the photos! We suggest a maximum of 1024 pixels wide although 800 pixels (largest dimension) is really big enough.
If you don't have Photoshop or one of the other common photo editors, there are a number of free, very nice image editors that can resize
photos. I recommend irfanview. You can get it at www.download.com. Use photo editing software to resize and then save as a jpeg. You can save as png, though these files are typically a bit larger than jpeg formatted files.
 Why do you limit the file formats I can use on the web?
Initially
formats are restricted because we want to encourage teams to use file
formats that are accessible to both Mac and PC users who have many
different browsers. If you need to upload other formats, please talk to
us. We can turn on the capability for other formats. There are no fees
associated with using other formats such as spreadsheets.
Not all of the files I want to use are in the formats allowed (e.g., HTML or PDF). How can I convert my files to those formats? Option 1: Free Online Service.
One convenient solution is to use a free online service such as http://www.pdfonline.com. Currently they convert DOC, RTF, XLS, TXT, and other formats to PDF and they convert PDF to HTML. This website is constantly adding new conversion capabilities. Option 2: Obtain Software to run on your computer. You could obtain software that will create PDF or HTML files. For example, consider files from http://download.com or http://www.adobe.com. We like BCL EasyPDF Printer Driver because it allows us to create PDF files from nearly all the software on our computers. Can't open pdf? 
How many people can work on the website? As many as you want! You can let any member of your website become an administrator.
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