Starting a Website

Its getting to be that time that I am really thinking about starting up a website. I want a professional looking site and the websites you get for free have very limited space and do not look professional in the slightest. I suppose I am starting this thread to ask if there is a guide to setting up a nice, clean looking website. I know nothing about website design or how to go about getting one. I get confused with hosting and domains, and the like.

I would assume the first thing I need to do is secure a domain name. I went to GoDaddy.com and it says the domain name I'm wanting will be $11.99. Then I went to hosting and hosting seems pretty inexpensive, but I'm not sure what I really need. All of the GB and bandwidth information has my mind turned into soup. Would anyone like to explain all this mumbo jumbo to me? :D

I've been wondering about this same topic for a while as well. Maybe if someone who is wise on the subject would take some time and write up a tutorial for us beginners we could have a new sticky! :)

Best thing to do would be for you to have your website powered by Wordpress (it's supported by go daddy) Domain is pretty inexpensive as far as hosting you can host it for less than $5 a month with GoDaddy.

The lowest/cheapest plan will fit your need (That is the one I have as well) I have been their customers for years never have any problem.

Their customer service is top notch as well.

The reason why I recommend wordpress is that you can find templates or have one made for you relatively inexpensively and wordpress would be easy for you to manage (easy to modify and update), there are also tons of add-ons that can be put on your site very easily without any specific knowledge in coding.

Ok lets see what I can add to Deborah's post. This is of course my experience and just my opinions.

Hosting
Godaddy has some nice options from the free hosting the provide when you register a domain up to the advanced hosting for $20+ a month. Personally I run sites in all 3 categories. I will touch on them a little here and put my opinions in.
Free: They offer a decent amount of space for free and its a great way to get started if you plan on trying out any of your own coding skills or have something simple you want to put up. They do offer some of the applications on the free account, but not many.
Basic: This one runs you about 4-5 dollars a month. This one lets you use many of the push button install apps they offer. These are great for a mis range site doing things like WordPress or image galleries.
Advanced: This is the 10+ a month one. This is for someone needing to have multiple high storage emails or a large amount of storage. I dont think you will need this category any time soon but if you want more info let me know and I will go into it further.

Any of these will work, but the free one will not offer push button installs for what you need. The free one will work if you have some coding experience and feel like getting your hands dirty or getting someone to do it for you ;)

Designs
As Deb stated, WordPress is great with templates and user submitted changes. I have had great fun using WordPress and it is very useful for most of what you want.

If you don't go with something like Blogger or WordPress you will have to either make your own site, have someone make one for you, or use on of the many templates out there. A quick google search for web site templates will give you more images than you can possibly deal with.

Hired Help
Here is where things get a little tricky and I will only add this with the assumption that you all realize I do web work and server work on the side so I may be a little biased to things, but here goes.

Having someone familiar with the ropes of a more complicated site is a very useful thing to have around. These people usually do this for a living and are happy to answer questions and help you to whatever level you need. Personally I enjoy doing web work and answering questions about it as. Others may feel differently than I on this but for me its a hobby and I enjoy sharing it :)

To sum up my nice long rambling. Wordpress, Joomla, Blogger, or a basic Godaddy Template are probably going to be the way to go for a basic site to show off your work. Once you get into adding a cart or tracking users you will need to add a Database and other things into and that will start to cost you either time, money or both. Please take everything I said with a grain of salt and feel free to ask any questions you may come up with. I would be more than happy to hop on and chat with you if needed. Hope it helps!

This is a site that I want to be able to have several pages on. Front page, about, collection, available, contact, and terms pages. I also want people to be able to purchase animals straight from my site. Would any of these work for me?

http://www.godaddy.com/hosting/websi...i=9028#compare

I'm okay with using a template (so it is still professional looking but not custom made for my reptile "business").

I would say yes to all but the Purchase strait from the site. Put some thought into how you want to do this. If you will be using paypal they have some options you can use for buy buttons and what not, but if you are trying to use some thing else you may require a little more coding on your side. You could still add that on to a template site from them though.

I would be going through Paypal for online transactions. Would it be worth it to go ahead and get the Premium through Go Daddy? I'd have all the space I could want and its only $8 a month. That is less than what I'd pay to have Netflix.

I really dont think you would need it and you can always upgrade later with no change to your site, just a change on the hosting end. I have the free and basic packages and have never run near the limit on space.

jarradw gives good advice. Having over ten years experience with web development, at least pick a host that offers you flexibility if you want to upgrade later. If it's a free host, keep in mind that there are some very important features you may be losing on if you're willing to pay just a few dollars a month. The biggest thing is backups. My host backs up my data regularly and allows me to restore previous versions of all my data. I'm currently hosting six websites and I had one where an attacker used a javascript exploit to add advertising to that specific domain. (Same thing that happened to BHB)

Within a few hours, I was able to restore a previous version of the website, patch the javascript and notify google that I don't have a compromised domain any longer and everything was back to normal.

WordPress is pretty sweet too. Many many many free templates, plugins and widgets. Maintenance on it is very easy. I have a friend that runs a book club and I host her site and set her up with WordPress and she has never asked me for any help after I showed her how to login. She's not that great with computers either, but they just make it easy.

As far as commerce goes, WordPress has some plugins that will allow you to sell things on your website via PayPal without much effort.

Thank you I completely forgot to mention backups as I usually do that myself via FTP and scripts. I am not very trusting, been burnt too many times :)

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Originally Posted by jarradw

Thank you I completely forgot to mention backups as I usually do that myself via FTP and scripts. I am not very trusting, been burnt too many times :)

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You and me both! I have been using Dreamhost for over 10 years and have grown to trust their backup system. I still use SVN on my local server for anything a client pays me for, just in case ;) And that's in a virtual environment (paranoid to the extreme) which gets backed up onto a separate hard drive.

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Originally Posted by jfreels

You and me both! I have been using Dreamhost for over 10 years and have grown to trust their backup system. I still use SVN on my local server for anything a client pays me for, just in case ;) And that's in a virtual environment (paranoid to the extreme) which gets backed up onto a separate hard drive.

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I like your style :) Side note know I dont feel like I am the only one who backs up my backups' backup :banana:

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Originally Posted by Jay_Bunny

I would be going through Paypal for online transactions. Would it be worth it to go ahead and get the Premium through Go Daddy? I'd have all the space I could want and its only $8 a month. That is less than what I'd pay to have Netflix.

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If you want to pay for premium it's fine but I can assure you that in 4 years of hosting my own site even with the content I have (which includes lots of pictures) I still have lots of space unused and I only have the lowest hosting service for my site. ;)

I would start with the smallest plan and upgrade if necessary however I doubt you will need to upgrade.

Oh. I was looking at them and thought when it said 5 pages it means you only get five pages on your site. Does it mean something else?

I work for Deluxe and we offer web design, logo design, hosting and also internet marketing for small businesses. I'm not sure on pricing but I can check it out monday. It's a great option for people that don't have the time or resources to do it on their own

Sent from my LG-P509 using Tapatalk

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Originally Posted by Jay_Bunny

Oh. I was looking at them and thought when it said 5 pages it means you only get five pages on your site. Does it mean something else?

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I am not talking about their 5 pages deal but their economy plan http://www.godaddy.com/hosting/web-h...dplink&ci=9009 which is compatible with Wordpress.

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Originally Posted by Jay_Bunny

Oh. I was looking at them and thought when it said 5 pages it means you only get five pages on your site. Does it mean something else?

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The 5 pages refers to a specific template. You can always add more later on, it just may not be in the template.

I design websites and also offer hosting packages ;)

LOL. If it gets too much for you, feel free to PM me.

Otherwise, good luck! Web design is a ton of fun

I'd like to remind you that advertising should be kept out of the main forum and either be in the for sale forum or taken to PM

Thanks

We used yahoo site builder. It is easy and looks pretty good too!!!

Oops, sorry Deborah. I've been lurking too long! :oops:

I went ahead and stickied this thread, as it is an excellent question that is relevant to many people...and is then followed up with excellent answers. Please continue the discussion! :D

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Originally Posted by jarradw

I would say yes to all but the Purchase strait from the site. Put some thought into how you want to do this. If you will be using paypal they have some options you can use for buy buttons and what not, but if you are trying to use some thing else you may require a little more coding on your side. You could still add that on to a template site from them though.

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Im also thinking about opening up a website. This thread has answered most of my question. The only thing im not sure about is if I secure my domain name and choose the basic web hosting service from go daddy does that include a shopping cart section for my customers to select products and choose method of payment?

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Originally Posted by nor_cal1980

Im also thinking about opening up a website. This thread has answered most of my question. The only thing im not sure about is if I secure my domain name and choose the basic web hosting service from go daddy does that include a shopping cart section for my customers to select products and choose method of payment?

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If you power your website through wordpress there is a great customizable cart available (you can see it on my website)

It's an easy add-on, no coding necessary to use it, I tweaked it a little to fit the color of my site but it's not hard to do and only involve a little coding.

Was weebly mentioned at all in this thread? Super easy, free and full of great add ons like forms and media

i just want to help anyone who don't know how to design their website.i can help u design one with my favourite web hosting(yola.com) or you can choose what web hosting you like but what i like about yola is they give 1Gb of free space,cheap domain,about $25 a year.here is my website that i design myself in just a week.

bpstudio

if you interested,please contact me

here is what i can offer you:

-complete website design,with all the feature you need
-paypal payment if you want to sell anything
-simple and very interesting design(you can see my website for example)
-i will help you update your website for a year(can be more than that)
-logo design(if you still dont have your own logo)
-complete with your own domain

*about the payment,we can talk about it later(you can pay me money or you can pay me with ball python...lolz.......

go with godaddy.com great site real helpful and easy to use :)

Lance

It should be noted - When you purchase your annual domain through GoDaddy they now include a limited amount of free hosting to get your site up and running, then allows you to upgrade as needed later on. You'll find for small business that don't push a ton of traffic or host a ton of images / media (use youtube for videos and that takes a HUGE chunk of your hosting worries away) it works great. I think it's around 10 GB of space and 1 GB of Bandwidth per month. There are certain limitations, but it works great with FTP hosting / editing using with Microsoft Expressions or Macromedia Dreamweaver.

year and a half bump not bad....

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Originally Posted by granitestate

Was weebly mentioned at all in this thread? Super easy, free and full of great add ons like forms and media

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Weebly is a great resource but so far as I know you cannot get it to be without the yourdomain.weebly.com without paying for it. I use Weebly to drive traffic to my site. Works great!

+1 to Wordpress.

I have set-up/maintained dozens of Wordpress sites and it's truly an awesome CMS. If anybody needs help setting up their site, let me know and I'd be happy to help out. Here are some tips though...

1. Domain & Hosting

I often find it is best to get your domain name when you pay for hosting. The majority of hosting providers give you a free domain name when you sign up. Personally, I love FatCow hosting. Been using it for years with maybe 1 or 2 total hosting-based problems w my site. Go Daddy is great but I can't stand the amount of extras they try and add on when buying. FatCow is nice and simple, pretty much unlimited everything for your doman, etc etc.

2. Installing WordPress to your site

I highly recommend using an FTP client if you are going the WP route. Adding images/files is super easy this way, as is linking photos for places like here. I have a Mac so I use CyberDuck as an FTP client (Free..everybody likes free). When you open the FTP for the first time you will have to enter your website info to connect the FTP account. All of this info can be found on your hosting dashboard (at least for FatCow it is all right there). Just plug in the appropriate fields, click connect and you should be linked up.

Once your website is linked up go to Wordpress.org and download the latest version of Wordpress, unzip the file and drag and drop the folder into your FTP client.
NOTE: Make sure you are looking at the files for your website inside the FTP and not looking at the name of your site only. You want to actually be INSIDE your site installing this.
Once the transfer completes WP will be installed on your site and you will then need to set up your admin panel. (www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin brings up your admin log in screen)

3. Making The Site Look Professional

You want your business to do well, right? So you don't want a website looking like its straight out of the 90s. All modular, everything just looks like a stylized Excel table... You want a certain mood, message, feeling to hit the visitor in the face when they enter your site. "We are professional" "We are in with the latest trends" "We care about our animals more than ourselves" Whatever it may be... lol

I highly recommend Mojo Themes for premium WordPress themes. I bought my last 3 themes from them and have been satisfied everytime. Once you buy a theme you get all of that theme's future updates for free.

Once you've chosen the theme you want, purchased and downloaded you will want to unzip that as well and go to your FTP account again. Your site -> WP Content -> Themes -> Paste new theme folder here.

Then go back to your websites control panel (Yourdomain.com/wp-admin). Reload the page and go to Appearance -> Themes and Activate your newly installed theme. OR On the Dashboard when you log in to your WP Admin you will see text reading "Theme _______ With # Widgets" If you click on the theme name there it will bring you to the theme page as well.

There you go! You're website is all set up! If you would like more help on anything regarding setting up and more importantly organizing a WordPress site, let me know. Web Design and SEO are my business :D

A year this time

Hahaha Yup. A bump doesn't really count with a Stickied thread, though... It's not really being "bumped" lol. I just wanted to add what I could to it :)