Do you have a website?

[Amandine]

My father is close to starting a business, and I would like to help him out some by looking into what it takes to create a website--I guess I should say what it would take for us to create one, instead of hiring it out.

Where did you purchase your domain name?
What program did you use to create it, or were you able to use templates?
How frustrating did you find the whole process?

Any information or advice you would like to share would be greatly appreciated!

 

[D&T]

I used to own four websites for our two business, real estate and our own family a couple of years ago but I no longer have them up... One of the best place that I found with very user friend template design is homestead.com. Very easy to use, and I loved designing with them. Customer service was great too, You can buy the domain name there and host your site as well with them. I used to go through Godaddy.com for the domain and then hosted with Homestead.com and it was a little tricky. I don't recommend building a site with Godaddy.com it was not very user friendly and very limited to your design.

ETA: I loved the process of building my own site 100%.

 

[Amandine]

Thanks, D&T, I''ll look into Homestead.

 

[DiamanteBlu]

He will need to get a domain name, a tool to build the site and then get a hosting service.

I have gotten all of my domain names through http://GoDaddy.com. I have been using them for years and they are cost effective.

There are some great tools out there depending on what you are trying to accomplish. Unfortunately, they all escape me right now [snarl]. They are generally free and vary from super basic to very cool and advanced. They are all pretty easy to use. I'm sure I'll think of some of them as soon as I hit "submit"!

As far as hosting goes, usually your ISP will provide hosting for you at no additional cost [along with some rudimentary site building tools]. Or you can pay to have the site hosted [GoDaddy provides both tools and hosting at a very low cost]. Host Gator is a popular one too.

If he is interested in a turnkey e-commerce site with domain name, tools, hosting, web optimization, etc. He may want to have a look at the Site Build It site. It is very robust but it may be more than he needs. There's a lot of good info on there even if he does not wind up using it.

Hope this helps.

 

[misskitty]

I have a personal site and a professional portfolio site. I registered the domains at GoDaddy as well, and I paid for hosting with AN Hosting until I was able to self-host. They''re relatively inexpensive, and have phenomenal customer service.

As far as building your site goes, templates are alright, but I like the control I have when designing my own. W3Schools is an incredible, easy-to-use resource for getting you started. I code in Notepad, but I''m weird -- there are many many programs out there that make web design more user-friendly (I usually recommend Dreamweaver).

Disclaimer: I''m a computer geek by profession, so I didn''t find it as frustrating as some. My biggest hurdle was making up my mind on what content would go on the sites.

 

[MonkeyPie]

I 3rd GoDaddy, and BluHost for hosting.

 

[mayachel]

I use one I created with vistaprint.com It was the easiest I''ve tried to set up, looks prof. and has definitely increased my business! It is very affordable...I pay $12 a month for it. Worth every penny.