Need to make a professional quality site without spending a fortune

alanclose

londonman81 wrote:

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!

Have you tried Elated pagekits, they are already designed mini websites that you add your own content to

millwalll

IVE SAID IT ONCE AND I SAY IT AGAIN BUT THIS SITE IS THE DOGS WWW.WEBMASTER-TALK.COM THEY HAVE A CONTEST PAGE WHERE U CAN TELL EVERYONE WHAT U WANT HOW MUCH U WANT TO PAY AND THEN PEOPLE ENTER IT U ALWAY GET PEOPLE WILLING TO DESIGN U FREE SITES AS LONG AS THEY CAN ADD THEM TO THERE PORTFOLIO ON THE COMPETION PAGE U CAN RATHER GET TEMPLAT DESINGED OR A FULL WEB PAGE OR A LOGO IVE USED THIS LOADS TIMES TO GET TEMPLAT MADE AND LOGO I PAY ABOUT $20 FOR A TEMPLATE THAT ABOUT 10 POUNDS AND ABOUT SAME FOR A LOGO BUT U CAN OFFER WHATEVER U LIKE EVEN OFFER THEM ADVERTISEING SPACE ON YOUR WEBSITE HOPE THIS HELPS

DavidPeakeweb

I'm unsure how someone with only a little understanding of websites and webdesign could create a professional looking site.

Certainly a little help from templates if useful, but I find you can never get exactly what you want out of them, and it becomes frustrating as you do not have the expertise to modify.

As far as going to anything more complicated than a contact form, which uses server side scripting, needing some knowledge of php/asp etc, I would of thought sites should be left to the professionals, which don't always cost as much as people might think.

Talking to a professional web site design company is always a good idea, even if it doesn't go. I believe web designers tend to overcharge people, and thats why I set up my own company to offer a fairer service to consumers.

I'm not writing this to try and sell my services, so I will not tell you about my company, but am willing to offer advice, to try and help ametuer designers.

I must say though, the site rentacoder.co.uk, seems a brill place to start.

David

Astaroth

The other part to remember of cause is the fact that looking professional is only part of the battle, customer usability is another one and of cause SEO.

Anyone who is creating a business website and has decided to do the webdesign themselves has a fool for a client.

A decent web developer will create a site with CMS and advice on ongoing SEO so whilst it may be a larger up front investment it will generate more income for you and the CMS will allow you to continue to update it yourself going forward.

I have to disagree with the overcharge element.... I think that this opinion comes from the 14 year old in their bedroom offering to do 5 pages for £100 type offerings. If you think about it, they are effectively offering to do the pages as £20 each... so for that they have to 1) come up with a design 2) create the design and all graphics 3) devise the structure of the site 4) create the copy 5) optomise it for search engines 6) optomise it for usability 7) test its function on the top 10 browsers/ resolutions etc 8) make amendments after bug fixing etc

Seems a hell of a lot for a professional to do for £20 which being realistic is less than 1 hours work for most professionals.

dave.trevena

If you sign up for Googlemail, you get a free website builder in wysiwyg format, editable online in real time, so the changes you make will appear quite quickly depending on your upload speed. Hosting is free, the website name will of course include 'googlepages' but they will also paste relevant ads on your pages to make some money back. Difficult bit is to sign up for Googlemail, as you need a mobile number registered in US, Aus, NZ, Singapore, and a few other places or get someone with googlemail to invite you to join. Check it out.

cookie_monster_8

lot of good info here just thought i would add https://www.scriptlance.com into the convo its a site where deisgners 'bid' on what price they will do your site for. A friend has recommended it

Stumpy

I've used https://www.freewebs.com - For my own site I just use it as a place to put my pages (ie, I don't create them online), however, they do have some rather good templates and it's very easy to use. You can try it free for a while (from memory, something like 50 file changes?). The free version has small adverts on, but you can pay a small amount to remove the ads. They also have various extra bits you can easily add on like guest books, forms, albums, etc.

If nothing else, it's worth having a play with the free version to see what is on offer.

HTH.

DCR_2

FJSRiDER wrote:

Nvu - totally free WYSIWYG HTML authoring software.

Thanks - great stuff. SO EASY to use

nelly_2

I used http://www.nsdesign.co.uk/ someone off here recomended it a bit back.

They have crackin customer support too which is extremly important in my opinion

It cost £116 which included the domain registration and hosting for a year and an easy to use sitebuilder programe that, even I managed to master and im a proper numpty

It looks ok and has brought in PLENTY of business www.myplasterer.com

wolfman

Astaroth wrote:

I have to disagree with the overcharge element.... I think that this opinion comes from the 14 year old in their bedroom offering to do 5 pages for £100 type offerings. If you think about it, they are effectively offering to do the pages as £20 each... so for that they have to 1) come up with a design 2) create the design and all graphics 3) devise the structure of the site 4) create the copy 5) optomise it for search engines 6) optomise it for usability 7) test its function on the top 10 browsers/ resolutions etc 8) make amendments after bug fixing etc

Seems a hell of a lot for a professional to do for £20 which being realistic is less than 1 hours work for most professionals.

Yep, totally agree with you there.

And a decent developer will code it effectively and efficiently (plus documentation). So that should they not be able to work on it anymore, it can easily be passed on to someone else. It's generally said that 80% of code needs to be returned to and maintained in some sort of way, hence get it done correctly first time round.

I've lost count the number of times I've taken on someone else's project, and been tempted to re-code the whole thing because it's such a mess. Very time consuming and costly.


You need to specify what exactly you want. How many pages. Will it just be static data, or will there be some sort of processing involved, databases etc...