Best free website to design a school website?

Dostoevsky

I've a domain name and an existing website designed on it (using Dreamweaver). However, it is very dated and the principal has asked me could I modernise it. I have no website designing experience, and can't afford to spend too much time doing this.

I am, therefore, inclined towards using one of the free website builders like Wordpress. So far, however, I'm finding it difficult to find one of these builders that will look like a website rather than like a blog.


1) We want to keep our domain and, according to the Wordpress website here I can do that by paying $13 per year for 'domain mapping'. Question 1: what, if any, are the faults of doing it this way? Are there ways to do this without having to commit to paying another annual fee on top of our hosting and .ie domain fees?

2) We will have about 40 pages in total on the website. I would like to do something simple and straightforward but stylish - "light" but definitely not cheap looking. A classical scholarly look would be my preference at this stage, but I'm completely open to ideas on this point. We will not be selling anything on it/making a profit from it, and we don't want advertisements on it. Our chief purposes are 1) to inform people about the school in the most positive way a website can, and 2) to allow teachers to maintain subject information sections on the website. Given these intentions, what would be the best free program to use?

That's all my questions for starters. If anybody has any advice on the best way to proceed with this that would be great. Thanks.

off.the.walls

For a website that size with that much content, get a designer in. It'll stand better to ye in the long run.

tricky D

WordPress on your existing hosting plan, installed from the selection your hoster provides. Any half decent hosting package has this available with an easy install, so no need for domain mapping. Then get yourself an appropriate template and some add-ons for things like events, galleries etc.

Dostoevsky

tricky D wrote: »

WordPress on your existing hosting plan, installed from the selection your hoster provides. Any half decent hosting package has this available with an easy install, so no need for domain mapping. Then get yourself an appropriate template and some add-ons for things like events, galleries etc.

Thanks. This was particularly helpful. I've been working on a Wordpress site for hours now and I'm wondering would you, or anybody else, have recommendations for a free program that we could use to show photos on the website?

daymobrew

Dostoevsky wrote: »

I'm wondering would you, or anybody else, have recommendations for a free program that we could use to show photos on the website?

You can upload photos to WordPress. There are tons of plugins for displaying galleries. A popular one is NextGEN Gallery.

daymobrew

Dostoevsky wrote: »

2) We will have about 40 pages in total on the website.

I think that you (or the principal or another teacher) should work in the content and layout of the site. This can be done independent of the "look" of the site. I like the TwentyTen theme that comes with WordPress.

You can download and try out a few of the 1500 free themes on wordpress.org.

Dostoevsky

Hopefully somebody here could explain where I'm going wrong. I'm evidently not reading codes correctly or, more probably, I'm not putting them in the correct place. As recommended, I'm using the Twenty Ten theme on Wordpress. I am trying to make the site a website rather than a blog. I want to centre text on one of those webpages. I googled and on this page came across this code as the solution:

#content .entry-title {
text-align: center;
}

The text I want to centre is 'Term One'. I pasted the above code into the relevant page on my Wordpress site but it just came out like that. Where do I put 'Term One' within that code?

I'm also having trouble understanding how to implement the code in Wordpress to change font size and font type, which is something I'll have to work out. I know the code (if that link is correct), but I just don't know where precisely to put it. If anybody can help me there either that would be brilliant. Thanks.

daymobrew

Dostoevsky wrote: »

#content .entry-title {
  text-align: center;
}

The text I want to centre is 'Term One'. I pasted the above code into the relevant page on my Wordpress site but it just came out like that. Where do I put 'Term One' within that code?

You have to edit wp-content/themes/twentyten/style.css.

Having said that, I recommend creating a child theme so that updates to the TwentyTen theme do not overwrite your changes.

I am happy to help you set up that and make one or two changes to get your started. Just PM me.