Im delighted to announce that GravWorks will open for user account registrations and to provide WordPress managed website hosting on 15 March 2021. All the details about what we can provide for you can be seen on our homepage.
Theres still heaps more to do of course, but all the action commences next week. But here’s a summary of what you can expect if you sign up for a GravWorks account.
It’s Safe
There will be one signup option to start, and that will be as a GravWorks Member, for $3 (AUD Australian, about $2.40 USD) per month. You can pay $6 or $9 pm if you want, but this would be additional donation and there’s no practical difference in terms of membership options.
Why are we charging for Membership, and so early on? Well, requiring members to commit to a monthly payment through a credit card is one great (though not bullet proof) way of ensuring that we are not getting spam registrations. Members can cancel their membership level at any time and receive a pro rata refund of any unused portion. Our transactions are all managed through Stripe, so you personal of financial details are not held by us. It’s safe for you financially.
We have also been at pains to choose what we consider to be the safest, fastest and most efficient hosting and maintenance arrangements we could find. Arrangements that should maximise your security and minimise your distractions. Nothing on the internet is invincible. But we believe, as far as we can tell, it’s safe.
Want a Website?
We can set up your website now, but it will take 2 to 3 days. When you sign up for a website, we have quite a few things to do, and its not all automated (yet). So for now we’ve decided that the process will be that we will send you an invoice (only when you request this, of course) due in 14 days. We will then set up your site, in the global location you request, with the plugins you request, and provide you with access and site details as soon as possible.
You will then have the remaining time till the first monthly payment is due to assess the site is suitable for you, and pay the invoice. This will then become your regular monthly payment, and this includes membership. If you choose not to pay we will of course decommission the site. But there is no risk to you. If you want to download site data before the site is withdrawn you will be able to do this.
At all times you can cancel and receive a pro rata refund.
What else do I get?
As a member you will be able to access our full site and all the articles we provide. Thats starting shortly. Members can request information and ask about approaches to deal with particular problems they face. Website owners will get precedence in response to any questions or problems they have. This will be both through the interactive Forum on the site, and reflected in the articles we produce.
We’ll be sharing our solutions to circumstances and problems. We hope you’ll also do that as we build a community around these powerful approaches. We hope to build a place to help you develop your business. We think there’s a large opportunity in this area, using this combination of resources. We want to help individuals, individual site owners, developers, and designers to learn together. But more than that, there are significant opportunities to provide support for businesses in areas such as site administration, collaboration, workflow design and implementation, remote work, building and providing templates, designing standards and approaches to accelerate development. Just to name a few. We think GravWorks should develop into a marketplace for these problems and solutions.
We intend to build this material and then incorporate these lessons into on site courses (free and fee’d) to bring on capable and developing talent, including from disadvantaged areas and circumstances. We’ll see.
The WordPress ethic and environment
The hugely powerful base on which GravWorks is built centres around WordPress (free), and a whole group of best in class free and paid plugins, themes, services (host and maintenance) developed by talented people donating or earning their living, worldwide. To bring these pieces together we have secured a number of (unlimited!) licences that advantage you through the unprecedented low prices we offer for this package. At GravWorks we recognise this. As we grow, we intend that ‘unlimited!’ will be practically recognised and we will negotiate with these talented developers to ensure contributions are properly recognised. Either way, recognition is most important.
Terms and Conditions, Privacy etc
Yep, we have these as part of GravWorks. Our intention is to provide the best we can for you. We rely on a huge chain of others in packaging these services. We don’t think you should be responsible for our actions. Nor should we be responsible for yours, or others. If what we can offer suites you, great, if not, that’s fine also, you can move on anytime you like (but we hope you stay 🙂
Thanks
So, thanks for reading all this. We hope you will be interested, and we hope you will join us on this journey.
See you soon?
Gary Kelly