Small business website and hosting?

eddie_c_2

I am about to kick off a small part time business in the next few months.

I need a basic website with about 5 pages and was thinking of doing my own with publisher or word. I am wondering if there is anything free software wise that I could use to make the site look a bit more professional, as the ones on publisher look a bit dated?

Also web hosting? I have seen some sites which host for free! Has anyone any recommendations, or any to stay away from, I don't mind paying something but not a lot as my budget is tight!

Also are there any other sites or forums which may help me other than mse and business link?

Cheers

skippy64

You could try Mr Site, it looks cheap enough & comes across looking very professional.

http://www.mrsite.co.uk/

Kilty_2

As far as hosting goes, GoDaddy is hard to beat.

Hosting and a domain roughly £20 a year.

Design is something you need to consider very carefully, think about the image you need to create for your company. Not all freelance developers charge the earth for good quality web design...............

eddie_c_2

ts_aly2000 wrote:

You get mail hosting/forwarding, ftp access. The cgi scripts are limited but that's no great loss given the whopping great security risk they present.

ftp, cgi? You have lost me there mate!

cheers everyone!

dmeagor

You usually get free hosting with your broadband account. Failing that the hosting companies in the US are very cheap.

For design you could choose one from a company like templatemonster for around £25 and customise it yourself if you know how. I don't recommend designing something youself unless you have the creative skills to do a decent job as there is no point in having a web site which gives out a negative signal and puts people off.

[Deleted User]

I'd personally avoid a template jobbie.. they look terribly tacky and are rather unspecific - I'd contact your local college / uni, they may have students looking for design projects - you can usually bung them a couple of hundred quid and get something pretty decent.

Oh, and my opinion is avoid using any Microsoft product for web design - be it frontpage, word or (god forbid) publisher.

Failing that, how about asking on your local freecycle site?

dbrooks19

There are some great looking basic templates here: http://www.oswd.org/
but you will need a basic knowledge of html to adjust them accordingly....

rls1973

sorry, thick question alert. can someone tell me what is html what does it mean? (i know, i know, sorry!!)

CrustyMcMuffin

html is the markup language used to control the appearance of a website, it stands for hypertext markup language.

I could go into great detail about it but I don't want to bore you.

Regarding the original question, depending on your budget most web design companies would provide 1 years hosting in the basic price of a website. I'd recommend avoiding authoring your own site unless you are comfortable with both the design and technical aspects of doing so.

[Deleted User]

wai - ditch the animated product gallery - no one is gonna sit and watch it, and make sure your shaded background image doesn't tile

the_optimist

ringo_24601 wrote:

wai - ditch the animated product gallery - no one is gonna sit and watch it, and make sure your shaded background image doesn't tile

...and have the pages translated by a translator, not google or whatever. The internet translation does more damage than not having one at all. Just looked at the German translation, the text makes no sense whatsoever.