Building a website

Got the ‘for dummies’ book.

Worth it?

How long will it take to get a simple functioning site going?

Don’t want a packaged site and have lost interest in technology (i.e. level of capability) - this is background info.

How long is a piece of string? You probably need to firm your requirements up before making any decisions.

I used to design websites using dreamweaver back in the early 2000’s and made a little money out of it. Now there are so many free sites and it is so easy to build and maintain your own website.

For my own business now I got my brother in law to design it, as I want a cart and checkout using Sagepay. This is way above me and he has had his own web design company for 20 years now and also does his own hosting. So gave it all to him and was up and running in a week.

Like Pap says it very much depends on what you are after. What I have is working extremely well for my business.

What’s it for? What functionality (if any) do you want on there? Do you have any idea of how you want it to look?

With the number of established, customisable web platforms available these days, it can often be easier to take one of those and and change it slightly to fit your needs. We’re not talking nasty 1&1-style sites here; rather something like Wordpress which is a stable, well-supported system that handles a lot of the grunt work and is ready to use virtually from the moment it’s installed.

If you’re wanting something more complex (and you may not realise whether it fits under ‘more complex’ at this point - thus my opening three questions), there’s certain elements that I’d sincerely recommend getting professional help for.

It’s horses for courses really, thus my opening three questions.

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It’s pretty easy these days lots of packages you can adapt to your own design.

I’ve had a site for nearly 16 years but I’m closing it down at the end of the year. It’s steam driven due to the out-dated software package I used to create it but there are so many pages I can’t be bothered to re-jig it to make it useable for mobile devices.

If I can make one…anyone can.

Good luck.

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Thanks all.

Sounds like I’ll take a look at wordpress and then workaround depending on my eventual requirements. A large part of it is likely to be very blog-like so that would fit the requirements. Apart from that there might be a sales end for other parts and looking at other comparable sites (e.g. you can post video, podcasts, etc) they do seem to be at the simpler end of the spectrum.

Off to start cursing at computers again.