Personal website

[gasman]

I have probably got another 5 or 6 years until I retire from my proper job...
I would ideally like to develop a little sideline when I retire expanding what I do now in terms of making a few bespoke pieces of furniture some of which I have posted here in the past. I thought I would probably start by getting my own website and putting some of my work on there. I have looked at a few members' websites and have some ideas of how I want mine to look - but does anyone have some tips how to go about making one. Are there 'kits' you can use to create one? I used to be quite literate at Macromedia Director and a bit of Dreamweaver so am no overawed about doing it for myself. Any help gratefully received
Thanks
Mark

 

[Dodge]

Hi Mark,

I used MrSite to make mine - £39.99 to purchase and first years hosting then £39 a year thereafter and you can do it yourself - its working for me.

Rog

 

[Adam Mada]

I use and would recommend sqaurespace: http://www.squarespace.com/

They have 24/7 support and their editor is super easy to use.

 

[mailee]

I used Serif for mine which was easy to learn for a numpty like me. I then found a host provider for a reasonable rate. Bob's yer uncle. :wink:

 

[superunknown]

I would recommend http://wordpress.org/ works for me and there are a million themes you can choose from and additional plug-ins for everything you could think of.

The software is free, I pay for the hosting for it and that's around £5 p/m and it comes with a database/email etc.

 

[SurreyHills]

If the content on your site is relatively static then a template based on Dreamweaver would be fine but if the content will change or you want to make the administration easy then l would also recommend using a content management system like Wordpress. You could either go with Wordpress.org or most hosting companies offer Wordpress for free (just check that you can get the MySQL database required by Wordpress for free). There are quite a few Wordpress templates, including some free ones, out there that are suited to Portfolio style sites. It saves a lot of headaches with having to use Dreamweaver and having to faff around with CSS.

 

[Adam Mada]

If the content on your site is relatively static then a template based on Dreamweaver would be fine

I would strongly disagree. Dreamweaver would be a terrible choice in my opinion - any of the other options suggested would be far superior to a Dreamweaver website.

 

[RogerBoyle]

If the content on your site is relatively static then a template based on Dreamweaver would be fine

I would strongly disagree. Dreamweaver would be a terrible choice in my opinion - any of the other options suggested would be far superior to a Dreamweaver website.

Dare I ask Why???????

 

[DaveChild]

A CMS is usually a good idea. If you're going to have a fairly static site, then use something like modx. If it's going to be updated more often - more like a blog - then Wordpress is probably the best option (but put it on your own domain, not on a wordpress subdomain). With either, if you want to make money from what you're doing, spend a few quid on getting a pro to do the design and setup (I'd be deeply suspicious of anyone charging under £500 for this). The simpler you keep it, the more design value you'll get for your money.

Buy your domain separately from your hosting. I use 123-reg and they're great (so far). For hosting, anything below $20 per month is likely to be a ripoff (or you've got buckets of traffic). $5-10 a month should do. The more you spend, the more reliable the hosting is likely to be. And host your email somewhere other than your website. That way, if you move hosts in the future, your email will be unaffected (Google Apps is great for email).

If you're wondering why you should spend more then £50 on a website, remember that there are people wondering that about their next coffee table. The difference between a cheap conveyer belt coffee table and a crafted piece is astounding, and so it is with websites.

Dreamweaver is ok for managing HTML directly, but there's no reason to be doing that nowadays with the huge variety of free CMSes available.

 

[Stormer1940]

Word Press is actually what some of the design agencies use... (My significant other is a graphic designer)
I've just had a website made up by the company she works for but they use a bespoke cms that was written by a website coder that use to work for them. The site I got would set you back thousands.
If you want a more professional looking site and don't want to spend much out then I'd go with Word Press as someone has already advised.

Also you need to go grab yourself a domain name. Have a look here http://www.123-reg.co.uk/

 

[Togalosh]

I see that this thread is a bit cold but for what it's worth:

I found Wordpress hellish to understand as I'm not into computers & so I bought WebplusX5 & found it a doddle to use (having had a lot of experience of photoshop) & the aftersales help from Serif was fantastic..they even took control of my pc & did techy stuff for me...the hard bit was getting my sites seen by search engines.

 

[superunknown]

...the hard bit was getting my sites seen by search engines.

That's one of the things Wordress does really well, there are some fantastic plug-ins for this. I got my site up to a page rank 2 quite quickly with a little bit of work and some understanding of SEO. It's worth taking the time and reading up on SEO. (Search engine optimisation)

 

[Gaz]

I agree 123reg have been hosting my website for 5 years, I've never had a problem, I would steer clear of their web mail tho as its slow and basic, they are cheap too, I think I pay around £6 per month. As far as your website goes I think it all depends on what you are looking to accomplish, if you just want a site as a hobby and to have people follow your work then build a basic blogging website, if you want to make money a blogging website also but bear in mind these can require tonnes of maintenance and seo techniques and are very difficult to get enough traffic for advertisers to be interested, if you literally want to show people what you do then a basic 2 or 3 page site will be fine, you can get templates for all of these online from places like www.templatemonster.com or build one from sites like www.1and1.co.uk!

 

[Charlie Woody]

A couple of years ago I bought Microsoft Office and it has Microsoft Office Publisher 2007. I tried to set up a webpage using this and found it hard going as I am not very technically minded.

I want something to show my work and also generate some sales (woodwork is a part time career for me), so I too do not want to spend too much and be able to do most of the web work myself. Basically I need something that is user friendly for the non technically minded and that won't cost much.

Earlier posts have quite a few different opinions so wonder if anyone has an idiot's guide to this whole process please?

 

[=Adam=]

Just a quick question with regards to a website...

If I were to download word press will it only design the website once I have got a domain to assign it to or can I do it all offline and then purchase/host the site at a later date?

The reason that I ask is that I would like to produce a small blog type website for myself however I would like to play around with the design aspect before I purchase a domain name. It would also be a possibility to expand further on my dad's joinery business' website however this would not be until I could use the package properly.

 

[loz]

Just a quick question with regards to a website...

If I were to download word press will it only design the website once I have got a domain to assign it to or can I do it all offline and then purchase/host the site at a later date?

The reason that I ask is that I would like to produce a small blog type website for myself however I would like to play around with the design aspect before I purchase a domain name. It would also be a possibility to expand further on my dad's joinery business' website however this would not be until I could use the package properly.

Yes if you are a little IT savvy,

eg i have several "local " installations, and the i just mysqldump the database, and upload this and the contecnt to my provider, this way i can make bulk changes to my sites, and test locally before going live. i also do this with Drupal,

If you are not IT savvy though you can build a html only site and do the same.

L

 

[=Adam=]

I would like to think that I am it savvy however I have never done web work before so I'm not confident with this sort of work.

It's worth a shot though haha

 

[loz]

Then give it a shot !

for wordpress you need a webserver ( apache etc ) and a db ( mysql etc )

I local install both on my laptop - then install wordpress, its very simple.

You then connect to your local webserver and build your site,

When happy zip/tar all the wordpress content from the wordpress directory and dump the database intoa dumpfile, copy content to your ISP and build the db at the ISP via your dump file.

if you are ok on deploying a local web and db server then you should fins the process fairly straight forward.

this precess i also best for testing major upgrades etc before commiting on your live site.


Regs
L

 

[Charlie Woody]

Hi Mark,

I used MrSite to make mine - £39.99 to purchase and first years hosting then £39 a year thereafter and you can do it yourself - its working for me.

Rog

Following your recommendation Rog I was just looking at the Mr Site details. However I have just learnt that it will only work with Internet Explorer and Firefox and not Chrome which I find easiest to use.

So just wondering if there is any way around this or are there similar offering to Mr Site that will work with Chrome?

 

[morfa]

The easiest (and pretty cheap) way would be to get an account on www.wordpress.com and then you can pay $13 per blog, per year for the domain to be added. There are lots of themes out there to make it look like a more 'normal' website.

If you feel confident, then you can buy a hosting package from somewhere like these guys - http://www.34sp.com/ isn't expensive and then you can install wordpress on that fairly easily.

If you do buy a domain, I can strongly recommend getting a domain from www.gandi.net or www.portfast.co.uk, (they're the veritas/lie-neilsen of the domain world (but not silly prices, just a few pence more for a much better service) and not 123-reg.