OK... I need a website. Any Web guys on here?

[NH Shooter]

That's about it really... I need a site. I can get my domain name, but after that, I'm fully stumped. I've found Wix and some other stores, but they all look like what they are... Free sites for advertising Wix, etc

 

Anyone fancy talking to me about it?

[Tad]

What are you looking for?

 

I do quite a bit of webhosting / server admin for a Non profit group, and i've been round many of the software packages.

[Chock]

Don't really have time to create it myself, got a lot on, but I can answer the odd question if you need it answering. A lot of the answers depend on how fancy a website you need; you can knock up simple websites in Photoshop or Notepad on a PC if you know some HTML code, but if you needed things such as videos, animations, shop interfaces and the like, then it gets trickier to do it yourself and if you don't know much about it, it is a bit of a learning curve..

 

To get started on what you need to look for, I'd have a look here: https://www.names.co.uk

 

They can host your site for 3.99 a month and a domain name will only cost a tenner or so, although if you host with them, they do actually give you a domain name for free. See also their header on the main page entitled 'Create a Website', which gives you an inroad to creating a site with no previous knowledge.

[Samurai]

IMO get a domain+site and set up a web content framework on it, like Wordpress. Usually this is done with one click. From that point you only have to manage the content, not the code of the software.

[Undieing_Lust]

Save your self a lot of hassle and use something like: Squarespace

 

https://www.squarespace.com/

[NH Shooter]

Yeah... I'm trying to get my head around what I actually wanted. I made a free one, but it's covered in ads... So I need to do some reading, I think... I want a shop mixed with a blog... Kind of...

 

This is me

This is the stuff I do

This what I sell

Here's some video and a gallery

This is how to contact me

 

I managed it quickly on the free one... But I wouldn't have the first idea how to do it on a hosted page, with my own domain name.

[Josh95]

I can make you a website, but not for free, and it would take some time.

The best way to make a website for free.... is to learn HTML... its a very easy language buy a book and get reading lol

 

but honestly Im doing HTML and CSS right now at uni, so if you want I can try my best and make a website. Cant promises it will be professional quality however as im only a student

[Samurai]

Yeah... I'm trying to get my head around what I actually wanted. I made a free one, but it's covered in ads... So I need to do some reading, I think... I want a shop mixed with a blog... Kind of...

 

This is me

This is the stuff I do

This what I sell

Here's some video and a gallery

This is how to contact me

 

I managed it quickly on the free one... But I wouldn't have the first idea how to do it on a hosted page, with my own domain name.

You want a webshop then, like opencart.

The payed hosts, have a lot of these things, like worpress, opencart, and hudreds more with simple install. You just choose what you want and it's there. Then you can create the pages with the static info and also the products you want to sell.

[ak2m4]

I can make you a website, but not for free, and it would take some time.

The best way to make a website for free.... is to learn HTML... its a very easy language buy a book and get reading lol

 

but honestly Im doing HTML and CSS right now at uni, so if you want I can try my best and make a website. Cant promises it will be professional quality however as im only a student

 

Maybe back in 2000 that was how it was done but these days it's all shopping cart and wordpress. Does help to know a little HTML and CSS but for most people they are more concerned with actually getting on with running the site and not coding it.

 

You say you want a shop with a blog.....

 

Wordpress has some great themes with shopping carts built in. Blogs are dying out these days in favour of Facebook / Social Media. Personally I like Opencart for shopping sites. The software is free and will work straight out of the box. Like most things in life learning curve....

 

www.unlimitedwebhosting.co.uk - Host as many of your domains for £3.99 a month. Service is pretty good, I run around 15 sites on it. VMware HA clustered (if that means anything to anyone) - get the odd outage now and then but support is always on the ball.

 

If paying for a site you may get lucky and get a "good" student to do it for you on the cheap, however expect to pay £££ for a well made site, custom graphics, logo etc

 

Need any help just ask...

 

 

OH and make sure you keep full control of your Domain Name....Lost count the number of clients I've seen over the years who didn't know who owned or managed their own domain names :-)

[Chock]

Okay, to explain a bit. Yes there are 'free' websites you can get, and indeed 'free' hosting, but as you probably know, there's very little that is truly free in this life, so there's always a caveat to 'free' stuff. In the case of websites, what 'free' invariably means is the following...

 

1. feck all bandwidth (so it'll be slow and unsuitable for any kind of high traffic or commercial activity)

 

2. you'll not be able to have a decent domain name attached to it, so again, not ideal for any kind of commercial venture, so the domain name you end up with does not look good and does not inspire buyer confidence, when it is something along the lines of: www.freewebsitehostingforanythingyoulikeatall.com/freeuser6789210/freepage/index/blahblah/etc as opposed to something like: www.alanbradbury.co.uk which is obviously a bit more snappy and which only cost me a tenner for three years.

 

3. free hosting sites most often do not allow commercial ventures on them, since they want you to pay for the service.

 

4. there's very little promise as to how stable the service is, since there's not much of a contract involved, and since you are not paying anything, you can hardly complain if it goes down.

 

5. no support if there is a technical issue.

 

So, what you really want is a commercial hosting package, and to pay for a domain name. Now, you should bear in mind that you do not have to be some kind of web HTML wizard to create a site if you do go with a commercial hosting package, because for one thing, they give you telephone support and often have many tools offered for free to help you create the thing and get it up and running. With that in mind, here's what you should do...

 

Go to the link I posted earlier on this thread and on the main page, check to see if the domain name you want is available in the 'Domain Name Search' box. You will find that the suffix can affect the price of a domain name, so if you wanted joesmith.com, it might be more expensive than joesmith.org, or joesmith.net or joesmith.co.uk etc. From there, you can see if a, it is available, and b, how much it would cost you to buy that domain name for typically something like 1-3 years (it'll be about a tenner, maybe a score if it's a dotcom). Next you look at the hosting packages. The things to look for are: how many email addresses you get, how much bandwidth does it offer, how many web addresses will it support (since you can get multi-domain hosting), does it allow commercial usage and all that kind of stuff. Notice that if you pay up front for 12 months' hosting, it is a bit cheaper than paying monthly and so on.

 

You'll find that you can get something along the lines of 50Gb of storage (that's for any files of pages of your website you upload to the host server, and unless you are planning on rivaling Amazon, 50Gb will be plenty), unlimited traffic bandwidth (i.e. loads of people can visit your site and download files etc), a free domain name, and one domain name hosted (i.e. one web address) for about 4 quid a month (if you pay monthly that is, it'll be a bit less if you pay for a year in one go).

 

So, if you went for that and purchased it, you'd have your domain name and the hosting sorted, so now what you'd need is the website to upload to the server. Now, a site can be real simple (i.e. it could just be one page), or is could be many pages with a navigation menu and all kinds of stuff all over it. Web pages are (typically) written in HTML code (that'd be hypertext markup language), which is a fairly simple coding language which browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer can read and then format into your web page' layout.

 

Here's an example of a real basic web page in HTML code:

 

<!doctype html> (this bit defines it as being in HTML 5, which is the latest version of HTML code)
<html> (this defines the start of the page)
<head> (this is the header section start, which contains information for the web browser)
<meta charset="utf-8"> (this bit tells the browser what character set to use)
<title>My Airsoft Blog</title> (this is the title of the web page, it displays at the top of the browser window and is also something search engines check for, when someone does a search on Google etc)
</head> (this is the end of the head section, notice that the word head has a forward slash in front of it, which is the HTML code language for 'end', the 'head' bit is what is known as a tag, and tags are what format the content of a web page)

<body> (this is the start of the main bit of the page)

<strong>Chock is being very helpful here, isn't he?</strong> (this text is surrounded by 'strong' tags, which would make that text display in bold type)

</body> (this is the end of the 'body' section)
</html> (this is the end of the HTML file)

 

If I saved the above with the name index.html, it could be uploaded to my host server and linked to a domain name (via a control panel you get access to when you log in to your hosting service's website). And that's it, you'd be done. All it would have on it was one line of text in bold, but it'd be up there for all to see.

 

So, what that tells you, is that HTML is pretty simple, but in most cases, you don't have to learn much of it, because most web hosting places have 'drag and drop' type website creation tools which let you do all the website layout purely visually, and they write the code for you. It's handy to know a bit of code of course, but it isn't strictly necessary.

 

Hope that demystifies it a bit.

[Alphoria]

Hi,

 

Feel free to drop me a PM, I'm happy to help you build a free website (domain payment is usually £10 a year however, so it's almost-free).

 

-Michael

[NH Shooter]

Well, Chock... That's excellent! I'll have a proper look tomorrow when I have a keyboard and monitor at my disposal! Thanks for that...

[Josh95]

 

Maybe back in 2000 that was how it was done but these days it's all shopping cart and wordpress. Does help to know a little HTML and CSS but for most people they are more concerned with actually getting on with running the site and not coding it.

 

You say you want a shop with a blog.....

 

Wordpress has some great themes with shopping carts built in. Blogs are dying out these days in favour of Facebook / Social Media. Personally I like Opencart for shopping sites. The software is free and will work straight out of the box. Like most things in life learning curve....

 

www.unlimitedwebhosting.co.uk - Host as many of your domains for £3.99 a month. Service is pretty good, I run around 15 sites on it. VMware HA clustered (if that means anything to anyone) - get the odd outage now and then but support is always on the ball.

 

If paying for a site you may get lucky and get a "good" student to do it for you on the cheap, however expect to pay £££ for a well made site, custom graphics, logo etc

 

Need any help just ask...

 

 

OH and make sure you keep full control of your Domain Name....Lost count the number of clients I've seen over the years who didn't know who owned or managed their own domain name

I'm pretty sure professional web developers do not use pre-coded plugins to create websites.

[Lozart]

I'm pretty sure professional web developers do not use pre-coded plugins to create websites.

Want to bet?

[Chock]

I'm pretty sure professional web developers do not use pre-coded plugins to create websites.

 

Among the many things I teach professionally, is web design, so, HTML, CSS and Javascripting, as well as pure plain coding. The truth is, pro web developers will use anything which gets the job done quickly, and that certainly does include pre-coded plug ins. A lot of the time, they will use PHP or other languages, rather than HTML, but you would be surprised how many pro developers do use Dreamweaver (and all the plug ins you can get for it), Muse and Adobe's Edge stuff, some will even use Flash and then use the Wallaby plug in to convert it from SWF to HTML 5, CSS and Javascript. The main thing is, checking to see if it works properly and quickly on a variety of Browsers and particularly mobile devices, and if it does that, then what you use to create it does not matter. It used to be the case that developers were concerned about very compact and concise code, but now everyone has fast web connections, if the code is a little bit longer because it is using a plug in, it hardly matters, since it will come down the pipe fast anyway.

 

Some useful links for anyone having a bash at it and wanting to learn some stuff:

 

http://www.littlewebhut.com (free HTML, Javascript and CSS tutorials)

 

http://www.w3.org (the official HTML arbiters, with info on all the latest coding standards)

 

http://teamtreehouse.com/join/first-week-free?utm_source=google&cid=1027&as_clid=297355d4-6045-4844-8f45-bcbd75433c5b:team%20treehouse:e:g:1t1&gclid=CJm737XNpMMCFQcewwodT6EA6w (not free, but well worth a subscription - which is only about a tenner a month - if you wanna learn how to design web content easily. These are almost certainly the best web tutorials there are on the 'net, although you might think you are watching the Disney Channel at some points when you see the presenters)

 

https://www.emailonacid.com (also not free, but excellent for checking cross browser compatibility)

[Tad]

I'm pretty sure professional web developers do not use pre-coded plugins to create websites.

 

Sorry dude, but you are wrong here.

 

 

Why reinvent the wheel if its already there?

[Samurai]

Just stumbled across this on G+

[Mr Monkey Nuts]

Ontop of all of that, you need to consider SEO, building a site seo optimised from the ground up is significantly easier than doing it retrospectively. SEO is essential to a successful website, do not underestimate it. We allocated 2/3 of our development budget to SEO.

 

I'm going to say it again, if sales is your goal, then I would recommend an Ebay Merchant account or an Amazon Marketplace account. Yes, It costs in fees, but you will instantly have access to a huge segment of the market you will in most likeliness never touch doing it yourself.

Then by having a simple cheap webpage for your local shop, keeps the costs down significantly.

 

I will be brutally honest with you, running a successful web store is not an "hour a day" job. It requires a significant financial and personnel input and will cost your business dearly in the first few years. If you skimp on it customers will know and will avoid it.

 

Some good info here:

http://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/marketing/internet-marketing/your-website

[Josh95]

Okay fair enough guys, I know that if I did that at univercity on a assignment I would be done for plagiarism?

Are you actually allowed to steal other peoples code and paste it into your own projects without accrediting them? seems a bit dodgy

[Lozart]

hotscripts.com is your friend.

[GiantKiwi]

I know that if I did that at univercity on a assignment I would be done for plagiarism?

 

Referencing, young padawan. Perfectly allowed to use libraries and plugins, as long as you attribute the owner's details at the top of the files or similar - Most plugins have said info included anywho.

 

Sod writing frameworks from scratch for every new project. That would be tedious beyond belief.

[Colonel Kurtz]

there's quite a few hosts that offer 'build your own website' services without them having to be packed full of ads. usually they just charge you a couple quid extra so the site name doesn't include their own. it'll be a ratio of monthly cost to ads, a dirt cheap one will be packed full of them, so it's about finding a middle-ground;

 

moonfruit was the one a friend of mine picked, she runs her own small company and opted for something like this where it is easy for her to make little adjustments herself.

 

if you get someone to make you a website then you'll be at their mercy if you want to make changes to it, so something like this may be best for you.

 

If you do want to spend a lot of dosh on an all singing/dancing site full of interactivity and animations let me know, I make them part-time