I need a website for my business

[Falangas]

I need a simple website for my business, but I do not understand anything about it. Where should I go?

 

[DANTENDO]

I need a simple website for my business, but I do not understand anything about it. Where should I go?

Google what you hav said

 

[FAST6191]

Assuming I have not just fell for a spam post (this is your first post on the forums and we are not exactly web designers or business forums here).

There are two types of website I end up making for people when "I need a website for my business" is called for

1) A basic "here we are, this is what we do, this is a sample of our work, contact details here", can be spun up a bit to include more pictures or PDFs or something. Basic "type in the box to email us" also easy enough to do here.
2) Something that needs a bit of functionality. Be it a web shop*, something people need to update in house (if you are a restaurant or something you might need your staff to add news, new menus, possibly take online bookings,....).

*I detest ebay and amazon for selling things, especially ebay, but they do handle a lot of aggravation here. That said if it is mainly payment you are worried about (and dealing with getting a credit card company to deal directly with you is worse than getting a little machine in) you can kick it to the likes of paypal (though you might have to do more depending upon what you sell).

You then have two main options for such a thing

1) You get either your local web designer, or possibly a kid** you know, to make you a simple website.

**10 years ago I might have said don't but frankly any fool can install and config wordpress these days, and frankly if you can post on a forum/facebook/use a word processor then you can handle a wordpress website (a bit less so the likes of drupal and joomla which are the main competitors there). Likewise you can do remote but it is nice to be able to go sit with someone if you have to.

2) You pay a bit (more than I would but I know how to do this sort of thing) to one of the people that advertise on youtube videos (wix, weebly, squarespace, to an extent wordpress's own hosting....). They do make things easy for you and have a lot of baseline functionality but I find they cost a lot for what they are).

--

I should note that most styles of fancier website will either have a plugin/script for the big CMS (content management system, wordpress, drupal and joomla being the big three examples here) or a standalone script you can install, often costing you nothing or a small sum to do it. Shops? Hundreds of options ranging from things that sell millions of items to ones that sell a handful (think art gallery) . Restaurants? Might have to stitch a few things together but you can have whatever you want. Need what is essentially a big list of other businesses? Plenty of "directory" scripts out there. Just need an image gallery you can update yourself as things come in/happen? Trivial, and possibly even available in the base install of wordpress et al.


Finally always always always make sure you own the domain for your business in your name with your passwords holding it all. "get a domain and hosting here" deals might well lock you into that company (and believe me they gouge you for rates when renewal comes around), do not let the local web designer handle it (or hand it in the contract that you get the domain)... it is trivial to have a website in your name (if you signed up to this site then you have all you need to register a domain) but the designers/whatever control any aspects they need to (you will either have to change DNS or change nameservers). Anybody that tells you otherwise is lying to you. I reckon a solid 70% of all serious website aggravations I handle are from people that did not know or follow this, most of the rest being from cheap hosting that the website outgrew and the rest being actual problems.
Migration is also a pain, though not as much as populating a shop. To that end "a basic shop for now" can make things harder down the line so be aware of that. I would almost go with none (or a link to amazon/ebay/facebook selling groups/having posts saying call us if you want this) rather than have a basic one and then have to migrate to another platform if you blow up.
In the modern world you kind of need a mobile phone version of the website as well. Most of the things mentioned above will do it by default so just make sure to check what you are doing as you go with whatever phone you have around.

 

[CallmeBerto]

Pay someone

 

[eyeliner]

Wix seems to be adequate.

 

[DCS9861]

Hey
I can help you for creating a good website if you are interested, Lets talk further.
Thanks

 

[Veho]

Wordpress is simple, noob-friendly, plug-and-play, and relatively secure if you keep it updated and don't install every single plugin out there. Shared hosting accounts go from $5-10/month and include Wordpress, and most include free domain registration as well.

Wix seems to be adequate.

They do have a complete solution in one package, but the downside is that everything is proprietary, so you can't just migrate away from their hosting because most of your site's assets (the code, themes, plugins, graphic elements etc.) belong to them, and that you can't get a local backup of your site or configure a remote backup, you can only make a "copy" of the current state that's also stored with them. Not ideal.