Need to make a professional quality site without spending a fortune

londonman81

Hi all

I need to make a professional quality site as a one off with good smooth pictures, banners etc.

But im not very up with website programs and don't want to spend a fortune on expensive software.

Could anyone recommend a user friendly and cheap/free way forward?

Thanks in advance!

L

bridiej

I used 1&1 internet, they host the site and have an on-line web builder. I did mine on it (you can view it via my profile)

g33za

you would be better off purchasing something off the shelf, design already done and all you need to do is populate it with the relavent data. there are lots of websites that sell this do a search in google, to start you off have a look here: www.templatemonster.com

kingpuck

hey,

if you were actually thinking of doing a bit of it yourself and think you could mamange to put it together within the month then you could download dreamweaver and fireworks from macromedia with their free 30 day trial.

this way you could get the layout etc down and then the it would be a matter of updating the content using a text editor. you could also think about making the site dyanmic which would make things even easier to update, though that would require some programming skills.

FJSRiDER

londonman81 wrote:

Could anyone recommend a user friendly and cheap/free way forward?

Nvu - totally free WYSIWYG HTML authoring software.

medical

can you buy peoples service ie people from india
iwould love to have a professional website as well
ta
medical

thecornflake

You can some fantastic free templates. Try oswd.org and webdesignhelper.co.uk (choose free templates > full page templates).

If you need some advice pm me - I do some web design in my spare time and if you know what you're looking for I have hundreds of templates lying around.

As far as editing is concerned it depends how techie you need to get. NVU is supposed to be good - I have it but haven't used it much yet. Coffeecup software may be worth checking out as well. I've also heard good things about Moonfruit.

There's a compromise between editors that require no code knowledge and are really friendly in that they generate all the code for you and therefore it isn't always the best code as far as standards and editing by other methods are concerned. How much of an issue this is of course, is up to you.

nickmack

If you have no idea about web design, then it's difficult to produce a 'professional' site quickly. You can get a reasonable trade off between knowledge and quality using templates, but whether this is good enough depends on the site purpose.

If you have some budget to play with try http://www.rentacoder.com where people bid to build your project. Read the instructions carefully and specify as fully as you can if you use this service for best results.

stolt

i'm too looking to get a website up and running, I'm a basic beginner and might try my luck and creating a coupel of pages to see how hard or easy it is, and after my effort check to see if it does look proffessional.

would be great to see if anyone else gives it a go on here and what they come up with.

ks62uk

If you want a dynamic site and your hosting package includes a mysql database you could try http://www.joomla.org - there are lots of free templates available as a basis for your site. If you have fantastico as part of your hosting package it can be installed in minutes.

keith

U've_been_framed

NetObjects Fusion 8 is free with the current issue of PC Answers and another magazine. It has a fair number of templates that you can play around with. This can give you a few ideas, then you can try doing your own.