UKC

I need something simple for my business, four or five pages and a gallery sort of thing. I see adverts for "wix" all over the place, but is that the best or just the flashiest?

Any other suggestions?

In reply to Frank the Husky:

Clikpic is quick, simple and cheap

http://www.clikpic.com/

In reply to Frank the Husky:

False economy in my opinion. If you're as much of a technophobe as you say, you'll just end up with something unprofessional which will reflect on your business. There are a lot of people who are competent and cheap. You can offset it against tax too surely?

In reply to Frank the Husky:

Squarespace has been used to make some great looking websites.

In reply to Alasdair Fulton: You may be right about the quality thing. As for offsetting against tax, that's a good point again, but I don't plan on making enough to pay any!

I've simply never done it before so maybe it's just a fear of the unknown.

In reply to Frank the Husky:

There is the mid ground option of just paying someone to do the setting up work. The structural layout; tied to Facebook or twitter etc... Then you do the leg work of the text, testing different pictures in different places etc..

In reply to Frank the Husky:

Ah, ok, so it's very much a "side project". Then maybe doing it yourself isn't so bad. Check out local meetup groups or free resources - there might be people out there willing to do it pro-bono to add to their portfolio?

In reply to Frank the Husky:

Squarespace is the only one I've ever seen which produces results that look professional. It's not cheap, though.

In reply to Frank the Husky:

I have mine hosted by some place called 000freewebhost, with a basic Wordpress prebuilt site. I own my name www.damonroberts.co.uk and just use the site as a placeholder for if I ever want to use it. Before that I used a company called LCN which was far easier to manage but cost lots (I got a years free trial of their premium service along with buying the domain name).

Wordpress sounds ideal for you, it works kinda like Microsoft Publisher if you find a good theme, and there are very good tutorials for using it.

Alternatively, a family member of mine does pretty cheap web design as a side job, so send me a PM if you want a quote on that.

In reply to Frank the Husky:

I went through a similar thing 2 weeks ago. Knew absolutely nothing of web desiging but wanted to do some very simple stuff. Got some free templates expecting it to be an 'easy' thing to customise it and got a shock, but persevering a little i stumbled into these tutorials https://www.w3schools.com/ which i can't recomend enough. The 'dev tools' panel in Chrome is also invaluable to work out what's happening, and doesn't take long to figure out.

After an hour i was able to customise content with HTML, in 2 hours i could customise and modify the looks with CSS. In 2 days i could design a site from the ground up with a bit of fiddling (and loads of googling) to work out how CSS positions stuff, and i started tinkering with Javascript. Now 2 weeks down the line i'm proficient in HTML, CSS, JS, and Jquery, and made a demo page application with an idea i had, all with custom original code, that friends in the business say i should offer around and ask 4 figure sums for it. My only coding experience was a little bit of 'basic. i learnt while in College over 20 years ago which that said was really useful once i started writing complex functions with jquery..

Give it a try, it's definitely worth it and interesting, and after the initial shock is much easier than it looks. Otherwise i'll make you a good price, ha, ha.

In reply to Frank the Husky:

I've used weebly for mine. Can have as many pages as I like for free. I get quite a few hits via search engines. Setting up good seo in the coding section of each page is essential and not difficult. If I can figure that bit out then another technophobe can

In reply to Frank the Husky:

Wordpress.

It is easy enough to use, it is the standard, it gets updated so your website is less likely to break as a result of changes to web standards or Google policies in the future, it is going to be around for ages and it can grow with you.

In reply to Frank the Husky:

Second for Wordpress, reasonably easy to use if you keep it simple, there's loads of advice online, most hosting companies provide a simple setup procedure and other than hosting, it's pretty much free (I think £40 for domain registration and 1 years hosting is about standard). If you're reasonably competent with office and computers in general. You can probably get a website up and running in under a day if you've got all your material sorted.

I've got hosting with 1+1 and Gandi and I prefer Gandi. They're not quite the cheapest, but they seem to work and I like their ethos... No Bull...

In reply to Frank the Husky:

*In my very limited experience with these things*

Third for Wordpress, lots of themes available with some half decent free ones. Well supported, lots of plugins for doing all kinds of stuff. It runs on SQL so your host needs to be running that. Most good hosts will run an SQL database for Wordpress by default. I'm using https://www.mythic-beasts.com/ for my hosting. They are reasonably priced, good tech support and local to the UK. They'll do your domain name registration too.

With Wix the design tools are great but you are locked into using them for hosting and can't migrate the webpage.

Don't buy your domain name through GoDaddy, they are a bit of a pain in my experience.

In reply to Frank the Husky:

I went with Squarespace having never set up a website before. I found them excellent and had a site up and running in a couple of weeks.

It could do with an update and I've not done anything too flashy but to give you an idea: www.JamesRushforth.com

Good luck with it!

In reply to Frank the Husky:

If you want to have a chat about setting up via Wordpress, drop me a PM

In reply to Frank the Husky:

WordPress with the Divi 3.0 theme which has a visual page builder

In reply to Frank the Husky:
It's very easy to use Wordpress, and if you have a bit of taste, to produce a decent site.

I use it for my site, and while no expert, am happy to offer some help, or tips and tricks.

In reply to Everyone: Many thanks for all the helpful, constructive suggestions - what a nice bunch of people.

In reply to MtnGeekUK:

I'm also thinking about a webpage - but know even less than the OP I think.

What do I need and what (broadly) does it cost?
- Registering of a domain name of the form firstnamelastname.com or .co.uk
- Building of a website from text and pictures
- Putting the website onto the domain (whatever you call this process)
- Enabling people to look at it over time (a year or so)
- A mechanism to take payments

The different products mentioned in this thread (e.g. Wordpress) are for the second bullet only or more?

Thanks for the help

In reply to Frank the Husky:

Another thumbs up for Squarespace. After I lost patience with my previous provider I managed to build my current site in less than 12 hours, pulling an all nighter in a fit of pique: https://www.arranwildwalks.com/

Its incredibly simple to use and not that expensive for a quality product.

In reply to JJL:

Can't speak for wordpress but you can do all of the above via squarespace. You can test drive their website builder before committing to buy to see if you like it.

Payment mechanism usually costs a bit extra.

In reply to JJL:

Drop me a PM and we'll have a chat...

In reply to MtnGeekUK:

thank you. Will do!

In reply to Mr Lopez:

You sound like a genius Mr Lopez

In reply to Frank the Husky:

I just spent 100's of hours using serif Webplus (£5 disc) to build my offline site to find it has been abandoned by serif.
However I may find a way around this but am very poor on URL html etc, server addresses etc.
Bonus, after nearly dying in morbidity, was that I have learnt instantly how to use Wordpress due to the practice on serif. Two months ago Wordpress looked like it would produce preformed undesirable stuff. In fact you can make it look however you wish, really.