Design my own Webiste

antog86

I am considering putting up a website for my new business, but not quite sure where to start. I would like to do it myself (money and sense of achievement being the main reason).

Has anyone any advise on good simple software to use to build the site? Im not fully up to date with HTML, so some of these build your own website design packages would be idea. Their is a lot of them out there though and its hard to choose.

Secondly, if i purchase a web building software (as above), is it as simple as then saving your files and transferring them to a hosting company such as Digiweb etc? If so, has anyone any advise on who the best company is to use?

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Tony Almeida

Purchase a domain and webspace from GoDaddy

Go to cmsmadesimple.org, download the zip file

Upload it to directory which you will receive in a link from GoDaddy

Extract it through the web page

Customise

Advertise

Profit

Retire

Drugs and Hookers

Jail

Depression Despair

Suicide

Death

antog86

Thanks Tony Almeida, my whole life sorted in a couple of lines composed in less than 2 minutes!

Il have a look into this now and see

bigbadcon

If I was you I would invest in getting a professional to do your website.

Having a bad website is worse than having none at all as it gives people a bad impression of your business..

Saying that im not sure what sort of sites these DIY programs produce...

steve_oh

I agree. Rather than designing a half arsed website frmo scratch - you should allow a professional to steer you around the rookie mistakes.

I bought a site from www.brianduffy.net for only €300. You get a profesionally designed site that allows you to login and make changes yourself. You have fulll control and can change anything you like - plus its real easy.

This way your business doesnt look like a garage operation and you get full creative control of your own website. Check it out

antog86

steve_oh wrote: »

I agree. Rather than designing a half arsed website frmo scratch - you should allow a professional to steer you around the rookie mistakes.

I bought a site from www.brianduffy.net for only €300. You get a profesionally designed site that allows you to login and make changes yourself. You have fulll control and can change anything you like - plus its real easy.

This way your business doesnt look like a garage operation and you get full creative control of your own website. Check it out

Looks rather good i must say. DO you have a link to the website so i can see what he did for you?

conman

if you want to use your website as a means for attracting business, id seriously consider revising how good sites are laid out... cut out all the personal stuff like what age you are, how long the company is working etc.

and put exactly the information a customer wants, example why he would go to your site in the first place..

for instance if you are to set up a golf course:

clearly show the cost of playing a round,
clearly show pictures of the course,
clearly show how to get there,
how to contact you,
perhaps a video if appropriate, as most people will view a vid before they read.

you will want to be able to update your site often,
you will need it to be Google friendly (seo), google needs to find you,
and about 90% of the Irish market use google as their preferred search.

HTML is relatively easy, but be sure that you can design it smart, ie: nice to look at and easy to navigate.



If you go down the root of having someone design if for you, or a company for that matter... they will generally design it and hand it over to you expecting payment.. this would be a mistake... let them build, let them hand it over to you, and allow you to use it for a month to give u time to iron out bugs, and see how easy it is for you to update.... if you agree to pay when they hand it over you might be left with a website that is hard to use or doesnt work as you had planned...


good luck.

Barrypr

Wow http://www.brianduffy.net the design and image work is awful!!!

Get a domain and hosting package - cheap nothing special basic package.

Purchase a contact management systems, better of buying one you can get some nice designs and brandimg free.

Then upload!

just my 2 cents

tricky D

conman wrote: »

if you want to use your website as a means for attracting business, id seriously consider revising how good sites are laid out... cut out all the personal stuff like what age you are, how long the company is working etc.

and put exactly the information a customer wants, example why he would go to your site in the first place..

for instance if you are to set up a golf course:

clearly show the cost of playing a round,
clearly show pictures of the course,
clearly show how to get there,
how to contact you,
perhaps a video if appropriate, as most people will view a vid before they read.

Yup a lot of hompeages yabber on about themselves (we are, we do, I have .... sounding like a bad chat up job), instead of addressing users' requirements: What do you need, we have xyz, get in touch/read more/Buy Now!

To reiterate the info points above, give the user all the info needed to make a purchase, especially price.

conman wrote: »

you will want to be able to update your site often,
you will need it to be Google friendly (seo), google needs to find you,
and about 90% of the Irish market use google as their preferred search.

HTML is relatively easy, but be sure that you can design it smart, ie: nice to look at and easy to navigate.

Content management is becoming standard these days.

The first 80% of HTML/CSS is really easy to pick up, the rest takes years to learn. Then there's everything else that goes into a site beyond mere HTML/CSS.

conman wrote: »

If you go down the root of having someone design if for you, or a company for that matter... they will generally design it and hand it over to you expecting payment.. this would be a mistake... let them build, let them hand it over to you, and allow you to use it for a month to give u time to iron out bugs, and see how easy it is for you to update.... if you agree to pay when they hand it over you might be left with a website that is hard to use or doesnt work as you had planned...

Ironically, the really good firm will charge using a 40/40/20 or 50/50 model where the first figure is paid up front.

Your problem finding a pro is that there is practically no barrier to entry into web design so many designers work doesn't tick enough of the required boxes. As a quick example the brianduffy site misses the following boxes: no colour theory, no physical address (for trust), no contact form, poor typography, poor seo, no legal info, no logo and many more other boxes not ticked.

So you'll need to do a good bit of research on what makes good sites and ensure that whoever you consider for a work can achieve the required standards.

gl

Tony Almeida

I recommend these:

http://letstalkbusiness.ie

antog86

Some top class advise guys, keep it coming please

limericklassy

Lynda.com does training videos for website dev. Best thing to do is to look at other websites in the business area that you are in.

steve_oh

Barrypr wrote: »

Wow http://www.brianduffy.net the design and image work is awful!!!

Get a domain and hosting package - cheap nothing special basic package.

Purchase a contact management systems, better of buying one you can get some nice designs and brandimg free.

Then upload!

just my 2 cents

The idea with www.brianduffy.net is you supply your own images and content. Most content managment sysetms are fairly hairy to learn - this ones a piece of cake.

It may not be the best ever but its simple and professional and hosting etc is all included in the price.

We have family friends in new zealand who run a B&B. I helped them setup www.awatealodge.com. They just wanted somethin that did well on search engines, was easy to update and didnt make them look like eejits.

€300 for everything? I think thats a pretty good deal

Tony Almeida

So you are Brian Duffy?

Axwell

steve_oh wrote: »

The idea with www.brianduffy.net is you supply your own images and content. Most content managment sysetms are fairly hairy to learn - this ones a piece of cake.

It may not be the best ever but its simple and professional and hosting etc is all included in the price.

We have family friends in new zealand who run a B&B. I helped them setup www.awatealodge.com. They just wanted somethin that did well on search engines, was easy to update and didnt make them look like eejits.

€300 for everything? I think thats a pretty good deal

With any web designer you supply the content, they arent going to write the text for a business the might know nothing about. As for images if you already have a logo etc then you would supply those, so brianduffy.net isnt offering anything different there.

As for the sites you linked too they are exactly the same in terms of layout and design and both look poor also. Its the exact same template just with different text and images, practically a carbon copy. Bad SEO, page names are page2, page3 etc.

You might think €300 for everything is a good deal but compared to what?€300 for a porrly designed site with little or no SEO and design to it is not good value as far as im concerned.

If you are brian duffy, as you said in you helped them setup the site which was designed by brianduffy then go read the charter about advertising.

BnA

As most other posters said, I would steer clear from going into doing this yourself.

Programming is only a very small part of the site. The two things you have to ask yourself when you are putting a site together are :

1) Will people be able to find my site (Search Engine Optimisation)

2) If people do find it..... what will be the impression they get of my company and will they buy something from me.

If you are going to get an effective site up, you really need to get someone who knows what they are doing to do it for you.

steve_oh

antog86 wrote: »

I am considering putting up a website for my new business, but not quite sure where to start. I would like to do it myself (money and sense of achievement being the main reason).

Has anyone any advise on good simple software to use to build the site? Im not fully up to date with HTML, so some of these build your own website design packages would be idea. Their is a lot of them out there though and its hard to choose.

Secondly, if i purchase a web building software (as above), is it as simple as then saving your files and transferring them to a hosting company such as Digiweb etc? If so, has anyone any advise on who the best company is to use?

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

I've already explained myself once Tony. I just hope Anto gets the advice he was looking for. Mine was genuine and based on past experience.

One thing I can add is this - getting a decent site put together is only the first part of the task. getting it to add value to your business is where most people run into trouble.

the 2 big ones are:

• Clawing your way to the top of the search engine results and
• Keeping in touch with your visitors / customers.

they're two big areas man and there are no quick fixes (that I am aware of)

Its a slog but if you have a good idea and plenty of energy then theres no reason you cant do the business.

Good luck with the site Anto - I hope it works out for you.

ShadowFax

If you want people / customers, whoever to take your website / service / business seriously, you need a professional to do it.

I wouldnt design it yourself.

You'd get a masterpiece designed for €300 on either of these sites.

www.getafreelancer.com
www.elance.com

I got a good bit of wrk done on these sites and it cost feck all. Alot of the designers are from india, pakistan etc, which is why they charge low prices...but some of their work is amazing.

Or try www.reckon5.com. They charged me $400 for an 8 page, fully designed professional website recently. Great design work!! Check out their portfolio

It worth checking out. Irish web designers whether they be companies, freelancers charge too much. Times are hard, you need to go where the best deals are...and what I mentioned above will solve your problem.

Hope this helps.

Andy_Black

Hi,

I would recommend finding out what people are looking for before you even create your site. That way, instead of building a site and then trying to get it found, you build the site up to meet what people are looking for. I explain this strategy on my own website, and have a few more articles you might want to read.

I use Wordpress to knock up sites for my clients. Wordpress is a Content Management System (CMS) that allows people to easily add and amend new content. It is used a lot for blogging so is software designed for the masses and therefore very simple to use. It's free, and is being used a lot for business websites too.

You can pick up nice cheap Wordpress themes for $80 from places such as www.ithemes.com or www.studiopress.com. Their themes look terrific and are easy to setup once you know Wordpress.

Simple sites I've created for client using the same $80 iThemes Wordpress theme (that I can keep reusing on mulitple sites) are:
www.relianceinvestigations.ie
www.dublinwashingmachinerepairs.com

These sites do the trick at the moment, and if we need to get the sites "made-over" to look prettier or branded we can go to the iThemes support forum and find people in there who'll do it nice and cheap.


Hope this helps.

Andy

Grow Your Business With Digital Insight
www.digitalinsight.ie

anbrutog

Barrypr wrote: »

Wow http://www.brianduffy.net the design and image work is awful!!!

Get a domain and hosting package - cheap nothing special basic package.

Purchase a contact management systems, better of buying one you can get some nice designs and brandimg free.

Then upload!

just my 2 cents

+1 on this Brian Duffy guy, he seems like a joker to me. Every site is the same , looks like he's one basic template and changed it ( slightly ) to suit each individual job. Exactly what good design should not be about imo.

bridgitt

ShadowFax wrote: »

It worth checking out. Irish web designers whether they be companies, freelancers charge too much. Times are hard, you need to go where the best deals are...and what I mentioned above will solve your problem.

I agree there. I got an Irish fellow / small company to do a website once for me....the mistake I made was I paid them a grand up front, as they requested. The initial work they eventually did ( after pestering them for 6 months to do anything at all ) was awful, and I never paid them any more or used the website. Avoid Irish web people if those 2 chancers are anything to go by.

EKRIUQ

steve_oh wrote: »

I agree. Rather than designing a half arsed website frmo scratch - you should allow a professional to steer you around the rookie mistakes.

I bought a site from www.brianduffy.net for only €300. You get a profesionally designed site that allows you to login and make changes yourself. You have fulll control and can change anything you like - plus its real easy.

Why didn't he do a better job on his own website then? That style of website would of being very acceptable 5 years ago but things have moved on.

Axwell

bridgitt wrote: »

I agree there. I got an Irish fellow / small company to do a website once for me....the mistake I made was I paid them a grand up front, as they requested. The initial work they eventually did ( after pestering them for 6 months to do anything at all ) was awful, and I never paid them any more or used the website. Avoid Irish web people if those 2 chancers are anything to go by.

What a ridiculous statement to make, there are cowboys in any business. You should have checked their portfolio of previous work or got some sort of contract drawn up or agreement if you were going to hand over 1k up front with more to follow. Dont just tarnish a whole industry based on your experience with one cowboy in the group.

bridgitt

Axwell wrote: »

You should have checked their portfolio of previous work

I did. They seemed ok at the time.

Axwell wrote: »

or got some sort of contract drawn up or agreement if you were going to hand over 1k up front with more to follow.

If everyone got their solicitor to draw up a contract or agreement on every transaction for a grand then a lot of contracts and agreements would need to be drawn up. Go abroad, you get better value for money. Even if its just to the North of Ireland ; people there will build you a decent website for half what you pay in Dublin. Shop around and ask their existing clients what they thought. I learnt from my experiences the hard way and lost a grand.

ed6hellsfresh

http://www.brianduffy.net/

This is literally the worst website I have seen in months.

Is this REALLY the advertisement for someone who makes sites? Who would ever pay 300 euro for that piece of junk.

I dont know code, I do know design, and thats not design. Terrible stuff.

Pixelcraft

bridgitt wrote: »

If everyone got their solicitor to draw up a contract or agreement on every transaction for a grand then a lot of contracts and agreements would need to be drawn up.

Any professional web company will have contracts already created for you to review/amend and sign.

bridgitt wrote: »

Go abroad, you get better value for money. Even if its just to the North of Ireland ; people there will build you a decent website for half what you pay in Dublin. Shop around and ask their existing clients what they thought. I learnt from my experiences the hard way and lost a grand.

Simply not true, in fact Northern Ireland have a much richer web industry, and hiring a good agency there would cost the same, if not more.

xxlplease

antog86 wrote: »

I am considering putting up a website for my new business, but not quite sure where to start. I would like to do it myself (money and sense of achievement being the main reason).

Has anyone any advise on good simple software to use to build the site? Im not fully up to date with HTML, so some of these build your own website design packages would be idea. Their is a lot of them out there though and its hard to choose.

Secondly, if i purchase a web building software (as above), is it as simple as then saving your files and transferring them to a hosting company such as Digiweb etc? If so, has anyone any advise on who the best company is to use?

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

It's hard to design a website that looks professional, especially having little experience. But not imposible, I would recommend to go to www.wix.com They provide free templates in flash, it is really easy to use it, offer hosting and you can use your own domain. I think it is good enough for a small business, you can check it for yourself. If you are looking for a professional help, check portfolios of different desingers and choose the one you like. Usually their own website says a lot of their work and style. Recommended above www.letstalkbusiness.ie or www.brianduffy.net wouldn't convince me to use their service because both these website are really simple and don't look professional.

Good Luck!

robfahy

I wouldn't recommend a Flash website, as nothing annoys anyone as much as having to install a plugin before they can look at your website. Flash websites tend to be Search Engine unfriendly too. If you would like to be involved in the website yourself, maybe pick a template you like from the likes of http://www.templatemonster.com/cms-blog-templates.php Make sure you pick a CMS template. Then you can get a professional to install the Content Management System (which is free if Drupal, Joomla or Wordpress) and template, which won't be too expensive (maybe €300-€500). Once that is in place you will be able to update the website yourself.
As a web developer I find a lot of the work is getting the design right, so if you pick the design yourself, you will save the developer a lot of work. As for letstalkbusiness.ie and www.brianduffy.net, you'd be better of designing a website with Crayons than trusting either of those.

Rob.

Atlas_IRL

Lets talk business. IT web company and the top of their page first thing i see is

Warning: fopen(/home/letstalk/public_html/tmp/cache/contentcache.php) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/letstalk/public_html/lib/classes/class.contentoperations.inc.php on line 568

Warning: fwrite(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/letstalk/public_html/lib/classes/class.contentoperations.inc.php on line 569

Warning: fclose(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/letstalk/public_html/lib/classes/class.contentoperations.inc.php on line 570

****ing jokers some of these companies are run by. Must be quite annoying for good Irish web devs getting a bad name cause of companies like these.

jayj224

ShadowFax wrote: »

If you want people / customers, whoever to take your website / service / business seriously, you need a professional to do it.

I wouldnt design it yourself.

You'd get a masterpiece designed for €300 on either of these sites.

www.getafreelancer.com
www.elance.com

I got a good bit of wrk done on these sites and it cost feck all. Alot of the designers are from india, pakistan etc, which is why they charge low prices...but some of their work is amazing.

Or try www.reckon5.com. They charged me $400 for an 8 page, fully designed professional website recently. Great design work!! Check out their portfolio

It worth checking out. Irish web designers whether they be companies, freelancers charge too much. Times are hard, you need to go where the best deals are...and what I mentioned above will solve your problem.

Hope this helps.

Reckon 5's work looks good, could you post a link to your website to show how it worked out

shane.burroughs

My thoughts,

I see that content management systems are very popular these days. In many ways CMS are very useful, designers push them because they can be pieced together very quickly with little effort, especially when using template monster.
I think that it may not be particularly easy to optimize the cms sites for google thus you would not get any relevant convertable traffic.

Your sites ability to convert traffic to sales should be paramount.
I would also be wary of low cost providers, you should expect to get good value for money but some companies sell them same site design (bought on template monster) over and over so your site is not original.

Making a professional site for yourself is achievable you just need to put in the work and take the time to research design and development tools and you must have a degree of talent for design.

Regards

Shane

Andy_Black

Hi,

Content Management Systems can be free (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal) and you can pick up free templates or buy some very cheap.

The major advantage of a CMS is that it separates the content from the presentation, so you can "reskin" a site at a later date without losing your content.

The most important thing for converting website visitors into sales leads is to have good webcopy. Sure, the site needs to have "impact" and appear professional enough for the visitor to trust that you're not a fly by night or spare bedroom operation, but the content is what they'll read after they've decided within the first few seconds to give your site a chance.

CMS's are ideal since they are designed so that us users can add content quickly and often, and so that we can amend content as we test our web copy and incrementally improve it based on market feedback.

Google loves Wordpress and the other CMS's because it believes you're going to be adding loads of good content. Plus there are simple free plugins you can install easily to help with SEO, Google sitemap creation, installing Google Analytics etc.

If you want to create a website for yourself and learn a bit at the same time why don't you do the following:

1. Install Wordpress (free and simple)
2. Download and use a free template (called themes in Workpress). (Google for "free Wordpress themes" and you'll see how many there are).
3. Get one installed that is close to what you want (don't go chasing perfection... you'll learn what you like and want through doing).
4. Use this new website and start writing articles and adding good content.
5. Work out how to get traffic to your site, and how to make money from it. (This is where you want to concentrate your efforts!)
6. If you succeed at Step 5, then maybe pay for a theme, or get one designed for you.... but do so out of the profits of Step 5.

I'm not a web designer and don't care if two sites look the same.
Check out the following two that I've done for different clients:
www.relianceinvestigations.ie
www.dublin-electrical.com

People could say they look very similar, but the proof of the pudding is that these websites (combined with a Google Adwords campaign) are providing the clients with sales. The clients can "brand" them or get them made-over later if they want to, but I've advised them do to so from the profit from the sales that these websites have brought in, and to only do this if they think the "uplift" in sales will justify the investment... i.e. they will get a return on investment (ROI).

I hope that helps.

Andy


Grow Your Business With Digital Insight
www.digitalinsight.ie

Pixelcraft

if you design your own website without much experience it will look that way. I don't know why people think they can become a professional web designer overnight, you wouldn't think you could design your own house professionally that way, I wouldn't anyway. Professional web designers study for years, and are continually doing so, both aspects of coding best practices and design theory, by all means have a go yourself, but you can't expect a professional result with such little investment (in time or money)

mikkael

Hi,

Depending on what route you want to take, I'd recommend this free download: http://netobjects.com/html/essentials.html if you intend getting into the thing yourself. It's excellent for what it does, and you can build quite a nice site quickly. The download is effectively version 7.5

Eventually, however, scalability becomes a problem, as does updating. I would strongly recommend reading Elizabeth Castro's 'HTML XHTML and CSS' quickstart guide ( about €30 in PcWorld ). One guarantee with Fusion is that it will eventually drop a ball on you, and familiarity with what to look for is important, if not indeed deciding to get into coding altogether.

Content is king, and being able to find it also. Sit down with a sheet of paper and draw out the structure of your site. Imagine you're the user and arrange where you want to go from the home page. Draw out the structure in tree form, and indeed design your pages the same way if you feel like it.

I would also make every image clickable. Whenever people see a picture on a page, they tend to assume it can be clicked to take them somewhere else on the site.

My own site I put together with Netobjects Fusion 10: the current version is 11, but other than adding a few features like ajax widgets it's getting less favourable reviews. Here's my own effort, which admittedly does need improvements, done with version 10: http://www.deadpc.net

Have fun!

Tony.

padocon

Pixelcraft wrote: »

if you design your own website without much experience it will look that way. I don't know why people think they can become a professional web designer overnight, you wouldn't think you could design your own house professionally that way, I wouldn't anyway. Professional web designers study for years, and are continually doing so, both aspects of coding best practices and design theory, by all means have a go yourself, but you can't expect a professional result with such little investment (in time or money)

But how are you to know if the web designer is coding it properly?

Pixelcraft

same with any business, past testimonials, make sure they do good work. I realise it's not easy for the general consumer to understand if something is coded correctly or not, it's the same with building a house, how does someone know if it's built correctly? You judge them by the quality of their previous work as best you can

It can be difficult sourcing a service provider for something technical, especially if you aren't very technical yourself. As mentioned, look for proof of competence: portfolio, experience, referrals, a definite workflow including contracts and timeline. Evaluate a few suppliers then use your gut.