Advice on creating websites

^ +1. If you are looking to add web design/development to your portfolio of service offerings, you might want to consider partnering with someone who already does it for a living. As you can see from the many posts above, there is a lot to designing and building good websites. You could easily spend the next ten years learning how to design and build great websites.

If that is really something you want to do...go for it. But if you are simply looking to expand the services to offer to your clients (about to repeat myself), another option is to find someone you can work with, who knows what they're doing and is interested and available to work on projects with you. Work out a business agreement and move forward with a new service offering to your clients.
 
Noel Evans said:
I was looking at a more specific market - not your online store or telco type business, more along the lines of the SME or individual end of the market and for that matter what is garnered in the content section of your main page as it relates to that.
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Fair enough. But to expand on your original point, if you are primarily using a website as a marketing tool, you should consider how your site will differentiate yourself or organization from the competition. This industry is filled with websites that pretty much say: this is who I am, these are the services I offer, these are the rates (psst...you actually have to contact me before I will tell you my rates), here is my portfolio, here is how you can contact me.

So the visual design, navigation, simplicity, or additional features and functionality included might just be what differentiates your site from the ten other competitor sites in your market.

The toast example is good but overly simplistic. What if there are two sites that both offer "the best toast in lower Manhattan?" Sure, lazy customers will pick the first one that meets their needs (and I don't doubt that many lazy customers are out there). But many customers will look at both sites and choose based on cost or some other differentiating benefit (eg. "ooh, this one delivers to my house for only $1 more! I'll take that one.").

In our industry, the differentiator could be something as simple as including a video to describe your services instead of using a long page of text to describe your video services. Seriously. Think about it. And I'm pointing the finger at myself here as well. If we really believe in the power of video that we're selling to our customers, why don't we use video ourselves? Or it could be a Philip Bloom-esque site that uses education to land contacts and jobs. In Philip's case, he primarily educates others in the film community. But you could also educate your potential clients.

As a friend of mine likes to say, I think you and I are violently agreeing with each other. Your point is a good one and should not be lost in all my babble. Consider the purpose of the site long before you even think about the content or layout of a site. It might just be a marketing tool but you might be able to use it for more than that. And make sure you consider how your site will be different from the plethora of competitor sites that are already out there.
 
My blog is a self hosted wordpress site.

It is heavily customizable, and looks more like a traditional web site than a blog.

I spent a month learning about wordpress in lynda.com, and the rest wasn't necessarily easy, but came a lot easier than I thought.

Take a look. Theme ran about $75.00
 
Hi David,

There are known exploitable security vulnerabilities in the version of WordPress your site is running. I strongly recommend upgrading to the latest version ASAP! wordpress.org has instructions on their site on how to do this.
 
GenJerDan said:
That's what I do all day long at work. Luckily, it's all intranet, so none of you will be subjected to it. :)

And it's all ASP (C#, aspx), which is semi-useless for the majority of hosts.

Anyway, Visual Studio isn't bad for creating websites. Expresion is...different. Dreamweaver is a pain in the butt. HoTMetaL Pro was nice, but has disappeared.

And I still do a lot of simple editing with Notepad. :)
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What? I'm puzzled by this (highlighted in bold), what do you mean exactly?

If your taking about Webserver Market share, then IIS is the second largest after Apache, I can't see how that makes it 'useless'?

Anyway for HTML use Notepad++ instead of Notepad. Once you tried Notepad++ you will never go back!
 
Anhar Miah said:
If your taking about Webserver Market share, then IIS is the second largest after Apache, I can't see how that makes it 'useless'?
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The Windows-based hosts out there s...um...are not as nice as the *nix-based ones. At least none of the ones I've looked at. Either too pricey, or too featureless.
 
GenJerDan said:
The Windows-based hosts out there s...um...are not as nice as the *nix-based ones. At least none of the ones I've looked at. Either too pricey, or too featureless.
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That's why you should get a private server (virtual private server). I've seen prices as low as £24/Month. And you have your own server with a 100 MB/s pipe, install anything (of course also available in Linux etc).

Shared hosting is another matter.

@Tom

Of course windows isn't good for Hosting, just some of the worlds largest sites are hosted in IIS, eBay, Hotmail, MySpace, MSN, MSDN etc etc

I can see this sliding into a *nix v win v 35mm Adaptor, so I'll self mute :)

Cheers
 
Looking at them (even cheaper than you've seen...to start), to get what I'm getting now as far as bandwidth, storage, DB/FTP/Email accounts would probably cost me twice what I'm paying now on a FreeBSD host.

Prices will come down, sooner or later. Or I'll just lease a line and run one from home. :)
 
GenJerDan said:
Prices will come down, sooner or later. Or I'll just lease a line and run one from home. :)
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I was looking into this, I've run my sites from my own home server, using just a normal consumer ADSL cable broadband.

But its just too expensive, even the cheapest pipe ran to something over £100/month for a 1.5 MB/s leased line!!
 
You'd have to be insane to want to run your own server these days. It's just too cheap and easy to have a data center do it about a million times better than you ever could anyway.

As to the OP, if you are looking to add web stuff as a service, or just need a new site, partner with someone, or hire someone. Just like we'll get people on this board picking up a DVX and suddenly think they are a DP, people learn some "web stuff" and think they can do that. It's the same thing in both cases. For professional results, hire a professional.
 
I'm not being flippant when I say this, but I believe I can learn to design web pages that can form the basics of a minimalist website that serves to promote a commercial service. I don't plan to delve deep into coding. If a client wants more than I could provide, I would either seek help from someone more knowledgeable than myself or send the client straight to that person to begin with. I'm not trying to pass myself off as someone who could do everything. I appreciate the advice, comments and encouragement of those who offer it. Those who caution my intent or dismiss my capabilities, without really knowing anything about me, will serve as motivation. :)
 
Mark Harris said:
You'd have to be insane to want to run your own server these days. It's just too cheap and easy to have a data center do it about a million times better than you ever could anyway.
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Agreed 100%

I did run my own servers for a while. For me the real expense and bottleneck was the pipe.

Terry I'd say don't restrict your self, keep learning. Think of it this way each time you learn something new, thats something you can offer.
 
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