website UI with backend for small business

Morpheus

Hi guys,

If I was thinking of setting up a website for a small business that required a small backend of some sort, what are the best technologies to use for the following?

Developing the front end? HTML, ASP.NET, ??

Backend DB of some sort?

Where is best for Hosting the above?

Anything that i havent thought about that you think requires some more thought?

Cheers!

Evil Phil

This really belongs in the design forum so I'll move it over there now, but what you need is a content management system (CMS) I'd recommend either wordpress or CMS Made Simple.

Pixelcraft

What does it need to achieve? I've started looking into ExpressionEngine and it looks like a great cms, without knowing specifics though it's hard to advise

Evil Phil

Is expressionengine brandable Pixelcraft? In that can you repackage it as your own?

Pixelcraft

Not too sure tbh.

p

Evil Phil wrote: »

Is expressionengine brandable Pixelcraft? In that can you repackage it as your own?

EE is great, but it depends on what you want to do.

I think you can brand it if you like, and you can actually just use it as a management & templating system and write entirely new interface to it that's custom, it's quite extendable.

All depends on your needs though, what type of site/requirements do you have?

steve_oh

what exactly are you trying to achieve and how much web design experience do u have?

TitoPuente

steve_oh wrote: »

what exactly are you trying to achieve and how much web design experience do u have?

That's the key question. Although it's not a CMS in the strictest sense of the word, something like WordPress might be suitable. If you're looking for more stringent publishing functionality, version control and tiered user management, an open source CMS like Expression Engine or ModX would do the trick.

krmwebdesigner

Morphéus wrote: »

Hi guys,

If I was thinking of setting up a website for a small business that required a small backend of some sort, what are the best technologies to use for the following?

Developing the front end? HTML, ASP.NET, ??

Backend DB of some sort?

Where is best for Hosting the above?

Anything that i havent thought about that you think requires some more thought?

Cheers!

Hi Morpheus,

You can build the website in xHTML/ CSS usuing Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage (dreamweaver has an upload function which is great). That will get you started. You can get website templates online and open them in dreamweaver to play around with them or build one from scratch.

If you have time to mess around and learn that's fine but you would really need a little knowledge of xhtml/ css to get started.

You can start the interactive part of the site by using:

1.Classic ASP (VBscript or Javascript) or ASP.net (Vb.net/ C#.net) & Microsoft Access or SQL server 2005/2008 on an IIS server or
2. Use PHP with a MySQL database on an Apache Server

You can download AMP (apache, mysql, php) off the internet but you can't download IIS. It comes with Windows professional editions.


You can get in touch with blacknight or myhost or letshost for hosting. If you're using a programming language and database you will need the database support on your hosting account.


You can also get custom CMS (Content management systems) such as Joomla or Drupal which you can just upload onto your server, set up and use them. I think there's an Irish built one here called Oscailt also.



Hope that info gets you started. PM me if you want more info about the above.

Good luck.