Building Own Website

aj9648

Hi

Looking to create my own site.

I have seen these website builders advertised - are these any good?
Any recommended ones?

I used to dabble many years ago by writing code, but dabbling was all and gave up and cant remember any of it now !!!

InsideInsurance

aj9648 wrote: »

Looking to create my own site.

I have seen these website builders advertised - are these any good?
Any recommended ones?

Why? For a hobby or for a business?

The website "builders" are ok, their main problem is that it looks like all the other sites that have used the same builder. Thats fine if its just for a hobby but if you are wanting your business to stand out from its competitors then using the same template and engine isnt going to help.

What is your end goal for this site?

Almost all reasonable sites these days are built on a Content Management System of which Wordpress is probably the most common but there are hundreds and they run on different technologies.

With these things are not quite as much drag and drop as the builders in terms of creating the layout - you upload a template and it is applied to the whole site instead. The creation of pages/ content etc however is as simple as its meant to deskill this aspect and in a corporate environment move this ability from IT into the business (normally Marketing)

If you've any "big plans" then I'd go down this route over a builder. Most webhosts have one click install for a selection of CMS and you then just upload a template of your choosing, there are many free ones and many low cost options. Whilst I normally favour .Net technology Wordpress (which is PHP instead) is very easy to use and powerful enough for most sites. Joomla, Drupal, DNN etc can all do more but have much steeper learning curves to operate it.

poppasmurf_bewdley

If you want to produce a simple website free of charge, I recommend the following:

http://www.moonfruit.com/

I've used it to produce websites for two clubs completely free of charge, and they can be expanded later if required at a very reasonable (£40 ish) annual cost.

aj9648

Thanks - Its for a start up business. Most of the stuff you just said - went over my head !!!

aj9648

poppasmurf_bewdley wrote: »

If you want to produce a simple website free of charge, I recommend the following:

http://www.moonfruit.com/

I've used it to produce websites for two clubs completely free of charge, and they can be expanded later if required at a very reasonable (£40 ish) annual cost.

Yes seen that. Also looked at http://uk.mrsite.com/

InsideInsurance

aj9648 wrote: »

Thanks - Its for a start up business. Most of the stuff you just said - went over my head !!!

In which case a site builder is fine, its just a risk that your site will look a lot like everyone else's site who used that site builder