Website Building & Registration

[jedibond]

Hello all,

 

A couple of friends of mine are starting a new venture and they asked me about setting up a website, etc. Now I know next to nothing about this but because I used to work in IT as a project manager, my friends assume that I know all this stuff. As anyone will tell you, us PM's don't know anything, we have techies who do all that stuff for us and as long as they assure me it works then that's fine.

 

Anyway, back to my friends. The business they're going into doesn't require anything all singing and dancing, it will literally be a shop window to say hear we are and this is what we do. No eCommerce required or anything like, just some basic pages with contact info, list of upcoming events, photos etc. of past events and maybe some links to social media sites.

 

Some of the prices I've been quoted have been truly eye watering and as they're starting out they want something seriously cheap. What would be the cheapest way of getting them off the ground ?

 

 

[ayjay]

I probably know less than you do about that stuff - but there's always freebies.

 

 

http://www.weebly.com/

[kirisute]

Cheapest way is one of th freebie services you see advertised but thy can be limiting with design and style etc.

Hosting and domain is cheap anyway; no more than £10 quid to set up and register a domain for a couple of years maybe £3 a month to host after that. That's a very basic service with maybe 5 gig of storage and no ecommerce etc, but it will have domain emails.

If they get that sorted and they ain't after anything fancy than I would think an amateur might do the job for 50-60 quid for a few pages or a template.

I've done them for less myself! But I'm a bit out of touch with php etc mine are basic like the angling club one in my signature.

Andy might know of someone or be willing to help.

Edited August 13, 2013 by kirisute

[nick]

you have a message

[Andy_1984]

If you don't want to spend much there is a service called Wix (http://www.wix.com) which has a free or premium service.

 

there is no domain name or hosting to take into consideration as its all done on wix.com

 

There are hundreds, if not thousands of templates/layouts to choose from and it allows you to very very easily change the website content in your browser by clicking on the areas you want to change, it really is simple when you have had a play around (think of it like that 1and1 hosting advert you have probably seen on the TV).

 

Plus side is your friends could easily get to grips with editing the events since no coding knowledge is required. Adding pictures might be a problem as I'm sure they have a set limit.

 

Once you have registered and saved your work you will be given a url such as http://mysitename.wix.com and there will be a small amount of advertising somewhere discreet on your website (how they can afford to give a free service).

 

the paid service will remove the advert and probably give you a decent domain name like www.mysitename.com

 

The downside is if you later want to move your site to something more advanced you can't take the template with you so would need to pay a web guy to come up with a similar layout and add your content.

 

 

if you want someone to do it properly (forget wix) your looking at:

 

a one off web design fee of about £200 for a 3-5 page website - if they try to charge yearly tell em to sling their hook

£6.99 every 2 years for a .co.uk domain name. - check 123-reg.co.uk

£35 per year web hosting (heartinternet.co.uk) - this is the most basic hosting package with no databases(required for ecommerce sites or sites that need to store information for the likes of forums, php (a programming language to do funky stuff that html cannot) is included as standard.

 

Ive always liked heartinternet. Their prices are reasonable and there are not any hidden costs like ive seen on some web hosting companies. One of them didn't say in the details that bigger 1GB email inboxes would be an extra £40 per year! They got around that by including 2MB mailboxes free, useful if you only expect to receive 3 emails.

Edited August 14, 2013 by Andy_1984

[kirisute]

I'll second heartinternet; I used them for all my sites as well as the angling clubs one

[Steve Walker]

Good advice from Andy. It's relatively easy to get someone to design simple pages that look nice but don't do anything. It gets harder if you need site functionality which requires a programmer who can also make things look pretty.

[kirisute]

regarding eye watering prices:

people need to consider the actual time that goes into such things; then the constant back and forth between client and designer to change this font, or that type placement, or can it be this colour and all that crap.

starting my clubs website:

logo design and creation: 3 hours (inc high res versions for letter heads and such like)

button creation: 1.5 hours

layout design: 30 mins

gallery implementation: 1.5 hours

data input: 3 hours

uploading and test: 2 hours

 

those are rough estimates as to what I can recall doing....if your car mechanic charges £40 (min) an hour for his skilled labour...why wouldn't a web designer charge any less for his skilled labour?

people need to get it out of their heads that computer work might be happening in offices all over the world by Joe Bloggs and his wife...but skilled computer work, is a skilled labour as much as any other!

 

if I do private pc repair I charge £25 an hour! that's roughly half price to what most in the area would charge and people still balk at paying that!! then they moan if I go in and get it all sorted in 30 mins!! my usual reply is: you don't pay for my time...you pay for my knowledge!!

 

sure you can throw together a really basic website in Office or another designer and upload it with relative ease...but if you've never done it before your looking at minimum 5 hours I would imagine; and that's if your computer literate and can understand the basics like FTP and uploading and sorting out your webhost etc

 

*rant over* hehehhe

Edited August 15, 2013 by kirisute