Best DIY friendly building and hosting site

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krassyg72

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Need to do a web site for my business. I am paying someone to do it for me but I want to be able to do small changes and upload pictures and documents myself. What is the most user friendly building and hosting web site along the lines of Squarespace? I only need the site so my business looks more professional and to display pictures of my work.
 
If you don't want to go use square space search "squarespace alternatives".

You'll see a repeated list if names like weebly, wix, shopify, etc.
 
I don't have a problem with squarespace, just curious what is the most user friendly one with the least amount of maintenance.
 
Most of those sites are set-and-forget. As for user friendly that's typically in the eye of the beholder so I would recommend checking them out and see what best fits your skill set and time.
 
The guy doing the site is trying to get me to host it with him and telling me that unless someone is maintaining my site I will get hacked right away. Are the DIY sites taking care of that as well?
 
This "someone" can't give you access to editing your own website? Changing, adding pictures isn't that difficult, not much coding should be learnt. Even if it is an HTML page. If CMS is used, it is even easier. And again, why exactly do you search for alternatives while still paying someone for getting things done? Anyways, DIY websites never look good IMO even if you have a really good sense of design because modern design relies on tons of research and only an experienced designer knows where to put a button so it will be clicked 20% more often than if it is located in a different place. I'd say that if you want your website to look more professional then it definitely is better to let professionals design it. I'm not a great designer myself and to make my website and content marketing campaigns attractive for new customers I outsource design to Awesomic. And according to my experience, it's a far better option than trying to figure things out yourself. Also, when you already have your website designed, it's much easier to hire someone who will get the coding done and launch the website
 
I am paying him to to design and deploy the site; I want it to look good. But after that I want to be able to upload pictures and documents myself without having to call him every time. From what I understand squarespace and the other similar hosting sites will be the way to go. I only need a basic site do look more professional and to display my work.
 
krassyg72 said:
I am paying him to to design and deploy the site
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Things may have changed since I last played with these services but to the best of my knowledge your site needs to be built using their tools. Your designer can't just make the site on their end and then upload it to these for you too easily maintain. Unless your designer is willing to develop the site on one of these platforms it's a moot issue. Typically if you are using one of these services, you are building it yourself and not paying a programmer.

Having them build you a WordPress site may be a better solution if you want a professionally built site that is easy to maintain.
 
This is the issue currently. He is using WordPress and the DIY web sites use their own platform. I think I remember seeing one that allows to import a WordPress file but I can't find it again.
 
krassyg72 said:
The guy doing the site is trying to get me to host it with him and telling me that unless someone is maintaining my site I will get hacked right away. Are the DIY sites taking care of that as well?
Click to expand...
Sure if it is not patched (due to using wordpress and 100 plugins that seldom get updated) and they want to host it to charge you for it. So, first off
1. DO NOT transfer your domain name over to them, no matter what they say, it is NOT required. Seen people lose their company brand because they do and it gets held hostage. Set the required A/CNAME records as needed to where ever it is hosted (see #2)
2. for Any hosting - You sign up for it, and you give the person who may build the site, an account (not full admin or access to change your info so they could "steal it" if they wished, an account to upload and deploy the site - this way it remains in YOUR hands at all times, and who ever maintains it has an account to do the work they need
3. backups - take a single backup every day of all components. and store them on your own system / backup place. Again, seen a rogue website person neglect a site, compromised, and no backups.. now everything is gone.

If this web developer fights back on any of this, tell them to pound sand because they do not actually know what they are doing.

And if they do build it as a wordpress site - it should be easy enough to edit yourself, WP makes it pretty straight forward. They could host it on say DigitalOcean, they have wordpress hosting packages.

With that, if you do go the wordpress site, please install a security tool like https://www.wordfence.com/ and configure it (and only allow you access to manage it preferably)
 
modi123 said:
Truth. Had to build a wordpress site for a relative last year and it took a month of me juggling various tools and settings to stave off the bots from hammering admin log in tries. So dang dumb.
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yup. while wordpress has gotten much better, some simple default settings can tone down a lot of the abuse, but a good security tool helps lock it down even more and keeps an eye on things.
 
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