making a web site.

rockchick113

I know this is a question with lots of answers.
I'm after setting up a web site something very basic to advertise my local honey and other bee related stuff.
How easy is it for a complete novice to set up.and can it be done for free.
I've seen companies offering to sell web site names.would I have to buy though them ?
Sorry so many questions

Cheers

Fortyfoot

Try Weebly.

Easy to use - http://brighousetag.weebly.com/

Fortyfoot

flashg67

WIX and others do free websites and are likely fine for what you suggest, but if you think it's something that may grow over time and you want a 'proper' domain name like https://www.saxonshoney.com then I'd say you're better off buying a domain with hosting from a company like GoDaddy, Fasthosts etc,although you will have to pay monthly for this. They all have built in web design tools that make it pretty easy to set up a basic site.
You do need to buy the domain name from an authorised seller, but you don't have to 'host' your website with them, although many will offer a discount for a year or 2 if you do. You don't even have to have the website live - you could just register the name and keep paying a nominal annual fee to keep ownership and stop anyone else nicking the name.

Give a free one a go initially would be my advice.

forgotmyname

Watch some free ones, i tried one 0000hosts? or something and every single update to the site needs to be checked. Supposedly within 24h but sometimes it took days. And even then only when i contacted them to say my site had not gone live.

Stupid thing is you could update a single typo and it needed to be checked again.

Check their terms if going the free route.

DavidP24

Wordpress.com to muck around and Wordpress.com when you want your own domain and own web hosting.

bingo_bango

For the domain name, expect to pay around £5 per year for .co.uk or £10 per year for .com

Hosting is something you may want to pay for. Free hosting is still available AFAIK but tends to be ad supported, and you will have little or no control over what type of ads are shown on your site.

Paid hosting is not massively expensive but expect it to cost around £25-30 per year for shared hosting (simply means that your site will be hosted on a server with other people's sites - has no effect on how yours would look). That should get you unlimited email adresses, more or less unlimited bandwidth and access to cPanel and something like Fantastico (lots of widgets and apps for your site, with one click installation). I would also expect a decent support team for that price.

However, there is no substitute for learning how to code your own site. That does NOT mean you have to build it from scratch (although that gets easier with each iteration of HTML/CSS/Bootstrap) but even if you do go down the Wordpress route, you will no doubt want to change the look and feel of the template you choose. The only way to do that is by knowing which part of the code does what.

The good news is that it's free to learn! Have a look at W3Schools and don't be daunted by the amount of information on there, it has step by step tutorials for everything and you can work at your own pace.

They also have free templates at the bottom of that page I linked to if you want something to use as a base for your page.

DavidP24

.UK domain pricing has been increased, tends to be more expensive than .Com and has VAT for the uninitiated.

As OP not really that serious I suggested wordpress.com e.g. MegaHoneyBees.wordpress.com, then if they want to get a domain they can and use Wordpress.org

Coding your own side is like building your own house, fine if you have the design and coding skills but otherwise it looks amateurish.

Most Wordpress sites have options that affect look and feel of site but yes you could hack a template to move something, just write down everything you do or you will lose it on the next update unless you use child themes and not worth getting into that complexity. Always better to find a plugin that does what you need, there are tens of thousands of them.

If you really like to code then Wordpress is good too because it is all open source, so you can look at code and see how things were done. PHP is probably most practical skill to learn as it is part of LAMP, HTML5 is useful to hack but messy, CSS if you want to write your own themes and learn design, but overkill for a hobby bee site or you will not have any time left for the bees!

jshm2

Wordpress is the easiest place to start. No steep learning curve and most of the stuff is already done and you can build upon it.

rockchick113

OK Thanks for replies, I'll have a look at wordpress
sorry for sounding thick, if you don't buy a .com or .uk etc where does your website go how does it get found ?

DavidP24

On Wordpress.com it goes under Wordpress.com, http://BeeMagic.Wordpress.Com as subdomain that one lost inspiration but this one is very well respected http://sethgodin.typepad.com.

Obviously a domain is better but it costs money, not much but a little.

That is another reason that Wordpress is so good, it started life as a blogging platform and Google loves Wordpress, but to be fair there are 500 algorithm changes a year so it is a constantly evolving dark art to rank in Google and Google trawls every quarter to demote sites that try to game it.

Still here are a few things you should know

Google does NOT rank Websites, it ranks web pages

Each page is measured for the following

Quality - The quality of the content you write on each page 350 words is a good aim
Authority - How many people link to you and you to them as well as internal links
Relevance - to what was searched for
Freshness - Google loves fresh content so if you put a post up every day it will crawl every day.
Local - Factors that will draw local visitors (Organic Honey in Swindon)
Social - How many social media sites
Video - Create video, post it on you tube, syndicate it and have it pointing back to youtube, then have youtube video point to your site in description with some good content about what it is about.

There is a plugin in Wordpress called Yoast which can help but the best thing to do is be yourself, show your authority in what you are doing by writing loads of content, connect with social media and get others sharing social links to your site.

Use local directories and forums that are relevant to your conversion goal (e.g. Selling honey)

There is an old adage in web, "The money is in the list" so give people a reason to register to your site, initially only ask for their email (you can get the rest later). Then just email them when you have something of genuine interest to them.

That will get you going, to begin with you need to do a brain dump to content, I would use MS Word Outline mode then mirror the structure, I can get you some inspiration if you PM me a bit more about the site. Who it is for, what your goals are etc.

MothballsWallet

bingo_bango wrote: »

For the domain name, expect to pay around £5 per year for .co.uk or £10 per year for .com

Hosting is something you may want to pay for. Free hosting is still available AFAIK but tends to be ad supported, and you will have little or no control over what type of ads are shown on your site.

Paid hosting is not massively expensive but expect it to cost around £25-30 per year for shared hosting (simply means that your site will be hosted on a server with other people's sites - has no effect on how yours would look). That should get you unlimited email adresses, more or less unlimited bandwidth and access to cPanel and something like Fantastico (lots of widgets and apps for your site, with one click installation). I would also expect a decent support team for that price.

However, there is no substitute for learning how to code your own site. That does NOT mean you have to build it from scratch (although that gets easier with each iteration of HTML/CSS/Bootstrap) but even if you do go down the Wordpress route, you will no doubt want to change the look and feel of the template you choose. The only way to do that is by knowing which part of the code does what.

The good news is that it's free to learn! Have a look at W3Schools and don't be daunted by the amount of information on there, it has step by step tutorials for everything and you can work at your own pace.

They also have free templates at the bottom of that page I linked to if you want something to use as a base for your page.

You can also get a copy of the Microsoft Expression Web editor from Microsoft's website for free now (since it's part of the Visual Studio and Blend tools) - just give it a Google and you can start editing your own HTML, CSS, etc.