Doing my own website? Possible or not?

tumbletots

I am thinking about starting my own business and wondering how easy it is to do my own website.

I would really appreciate peoples thoughts on this. Is it realistic to do my own site or am i being overly optimistic! I have a fairly limited knowledge of computers and don't really know where to start but willing to learn. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

DVardysShadow

Depends upon your ambitions. If it just to effectively advertise and provide contact information, you could do it.

If you want to conduct trade on line, that is a whole different ball game.

vaio

any suggestions for suitable software?

JuniorDesigner

Free website builder (Weebly, Moonfruit) if you're not familiar with website building software such as Dreamweaver!

Stew68

I built a website, though it isn't for a business and used Serif Website Plus software (not the latest version as it was cheaper!). It's basically a WYSIWYG software (What You See Is What You Get) and found it nice and easy to use. It has plenty of features including photo galleries and i've had plenty of comments about how professional it looks. You would of course need to find a webhost who would host the website for you but there are plenty of those out there.

Hope that helps.

dug123

Serif WebPlus is excellent software and easy to use and just have a look at the webplus internet page to give you an idea of the sites you can make. It is always on offer and the latest versions are usually about £60 (phone and ask, they are in the UK and it is great talking to someone British)
http://www.serif.com/webplus/

leseul

What kind of business are you in? do you need just a simple web presence or are you going to need loads of pages or to take orders/bookings and other e-commerce features? do you need visitor interaction?

IMO building your own website may seem a good idea but unless you have the technical knowhow & skill or the time to invest to do it properly then I would advise against it. You should hire a pro as the return on doing so is massive and frees you up to focus on your business.
Ask yourself how much you know about: Search Engine Optimisation & eMarketing, Visitor behaviour and needs, Traffic analysis and current design trends. If the answer is not much then it's going to take you more time than would be economical to produce a suitable website.

Having said that, Content Management Systems (like Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal) can offer great free & paid templates that takes a lot of the hard work out of it, are easy to install with most hosts, lets you focus on content and have been designed to be search engine friendly.

mart44

I built my own non-commercial site using a WYSIWYG editor called Namo WebEditor 5. Working sometimes with the WYSIWYG interface and sometimes within the code. There is a learning curve to doing that though, so if you want to get a site up and running quickly and aren't too interested in that part, then somewhere offering templates and/or a service might be better. If you would be interested in the actual making of the site, as much as its final purpose, then editors such as Serif WebPlus or Xara Web Designer might be more what to use.

nomnomnom

Wordpress is so easy to use and update when you need. You could try a hosting company like heart internet and spend about a tenner a month which has all the software ready to install in your control panel.

Catbells

Was going to ask the exact same thing Tumbletots -thanks.
I want to set up a website which wouldn't be for business although it is likely people may want to purchase some of the photos on there (sport). It would also require a forum. Am not sure what a website hosting company is and I can't afford £10 a month. Is it essential to have one of these? Also how much does one pay to have someone design a website?
I just visited this site (http://www.123-reg.co.uk/domain-names/index.shtml) and it has exactly the website name I want which happens to be someone's name. Does this mean that I can't use this name for my website? Thanks for any info.

AliceJenkins

It's easy enough to do, but like others have said, you need to give more information.