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Creating a website

M

Malystryx

Weaksauce
Joined
Apr 7, 2005
Messages
121
Hey guys, I'm wanting to design a web-site for myself. I enjoy working on cars, repainting them, customizing, building and tuning them. It's just something I do as a hobby and on the side (I usually buy a non-running car cheap, fix it up, make sure everything's right and re-sell for my side business, I also tune the ECM other friends cars). But lately I've been wanting to take it a step further as in trying to get my name out there in the car world. So I want to make a website just showing some of the cars I've done in the past and services that I am capable of doing. I have a very strong background in hardware and networking, and my career is in IT. But I haven't touched anything to do with web design since college in 2008 where I had an HTML class and created a few very basic sites with CSS. Dreamweaver was big at the time but I honestly didn't care for it.

I'm just wondering what are people using now to design web-sites that's not overly complicated? Do people still hardcode with HTML/CSS to design visually appealing websites? Or are they using other software? When I start designing this web-site in the next couple weeks to months I would like to be current with the standards out there and use something with a lot of support as I will most definitely be learning everything as I go. Thanks for any help!
 
For the record: I am not a web-designer, it is not my profession, feel free to take my advice with a grain of salt.

Generally hardcoding isn't the way that I would recommend building a site, especially if you ever want to update it with new information, or photos etc. It can become a headache quick.

Instead I would highly recommend looking for a finding a CMS that you like and use that to build your business. CMS means: Content Management System. You've seen tons of them but you probably weren't aware. These systems essentially handle all the backend for you so you don't have to keep changing and writing code. If you want a slightly more advanced explanation: they are essentially software coded in PHP (or other web programming languages) that allow for pages to be created dynamically without needing to 'hard code' every page. On a large scale, this is how Google and Amazon work (obviously there isn't some poor programmer programming in every search term combination, the CMS in combination with lookup tables generates the content). It's also how most shopping sites operate, which allow for easy drag and drop creation of categories.

I suppose the other important thing to mention is that with a CMS like any other website you can customize it to look and feel however you want. But there are tons of people that are too lazy or cheap to go past anything but either the original template or other free built templates. A half-way decent design isn't particularly expensive, and can be had for around $40 on themeforest. Cheaper stuff is available too, but if you're using this for work, I of course recommend digging through all of them and finding the one that has all the features you want and looks like you want it to look. You can of course spend the time to build your own look, but generally speaking it will take more knowledge than just html and CSS to do so. Generally some level of PHP is required, and also knowing the proprietary 'tags' that are part of whatever CMS you use. As such if you're looking for the shortest method, simply buying a theme and editing the theme to suit your needs is probably the fastest/easiest way to get a site up and running.

If you want something 100% custom (which honestly if you're a small business you don't) most good designers cost $2k and up to start. Which, if your business is contributing a lot to your yearly income isn't a lot of money and is probably an excellent investment. However, if you're just starting out, like I say, a completely custom site isn't necessary. Your content will matter much more.


Wordpress is probably one of the more common ones which originally started out as a blogging tool, and then eventually added features to streamline many things. I would say that Wordpress is probably one of the better, easier to setup, portfolio display tools. It's not the best CMS for trying to sell product, but it isn't the worst in the world either.

On the complex side of things there is Drupal. Not as user friendly, but extremely powerful if the time is spent programming it.

I'm sure someone will be able to give you a better suggestion for which CMS to use for your application. I am currently using Wordpress to manage my site, but I'm not selling anything either.
 
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Rolling your own CSS and markup is one thing, but manual updates can become tedious over time compared with using publishing tools and building data-driven site. Though the data-driven site would have a larger upfront calendar cost compared with manually editing markup files.

An alternative approach is to just use a blogging engine -- WordPress, dasBlog, etc. Much of the decision, I feel, involves more with how quickly you want a working solution, and how nice of a solution it is.

I suggest looking at one or two blog engines first, since you would get a quicker idea of content creation and maintenance timeframes. Then look into rolling your own implementation, and the scope of what the type and level of involvement would be for creating and maintaining content. Then evaluate your findings against the level of commitment and involvement you want to have with this.
 
TLDR; Use wordpress and pre-made templates unless you're a designer/programmer.
 
WordPress. I generally always do mine with straight code in dreamweaver, but they can end up being a pain just to up date something small.

For example the website I built for my dad's business is up to about 40 or so pages. The navigation bar is made with css, but I haven't been able to figure out how to configure it so it will reference an external file that contains all the names/links for it. So, I have to go to every page, edit the code, and upload just add or change one little link. Bleh.
 
There's so many great templates in the wild that designing from the ground up seems so damn pointless. Chances are that there is good pre-existing code out there that you can tweak to your liking.
 
+1 for WordPress

As a PHP developer I hate the thing with a passion, but for quick easy setup of basic sites it's hard to beat really.
 
+1 Word Press

I too am a PHP dev. If you dont have much web experience and aren't looking to learn too much about it just slap that up there. It will get you everything you need. You can also buy cheap ass templates to lay over it and will cost you less time and money then either working on it yourself or learning programming from scratch. Although learning a new skill is never a bad investment.
 
It depends on your level of coding and what you want to do with it, if you're looking to do marketing stuff squarespace seems fine but wordpress is much more flexible and you can choose your host and probably has far more customization available. Whereas squarespace you're kind of just stuck with what they offer unless you pay for custom stuff which i dunno how that works.

I'd say squarespace would be for very very basic users, its really simple and they will hold your hand through the process of a domain and all that jazz. While wordpress is purely just a peice of software. You pretty much will have to provide the host or get a host that will setup a wordpress site easily and set it up. So you have to have a little knowledge of websites and what have you.

I dunno I dont use either of them but thats what i pick up from browsing them
 
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