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zechs3

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 4, 2011
Messages
307
Hello all,

I have been trying to build a small site to showcase my work for a while now.
I picked up a book on HTML and CSS a while back and gave it a go, but I'm not really satisfied.
The whole thing just looks like a hobbyist job. Especially on mobile devices.

Is there anyone here who wouldn't mind taking a look at my site?

My ask are :

Is my code salvageable?

How much would it cost to get it in line with some of my competitors?

Someone has already suggested starting fresh with Wordpress, thoughts? (least favorite option)

Thanks in advance,
 
Sure - shoot me a message with it.

Though, yes - wordpress/drupal/joomla are good places to go. Themes are cheap bordering on free, the designs are tested, and frees most folk up from having to be part time web devs to just having an online presence and go about doing what ever they are doing.
 
modi123 said:
Sure - shoot me a message with it.

Though, yes - wordpress/drupal/joomla are good places to go. Themes are cheap bordering on free, the designs are tested, and frees most folk up from having to be part time web devs to just having an online presence and go about doing what ever they are doing.
Click to expand...
Thanks, sent it over.
 
zechs3 said:
Someone has already suggested starting fresh with Wordpress, thoughts? (least favorite option)
Click to expand...


WordPress isn't [H] but it's the quickest way to get a professional looking site with minimal knowledge (short of real god awful offerings like wix). The free templates can look a bit generic, but there are plenty of affordable paid ones that can give you a very nice site that is super easy to manage content on.

IMHO if you work in a tech field, or your customers do, you may want to avoid it simply for the stigma. Otherwise there is northing wrong with a nice WP site, just be sure to keep it updated.
 
For most people that don't want to spend time programming (IE: non coders) and getting a site up I recommend moving to Squarespace. It's like $120 a year, but honestly for the lack of headache I'm super happy I went that way.
I did WordPress for about 4 years, and was never happy. It takes too many plugins to get all the functionality and every update you need to backup your entire site and hope that the update doesn't break your site or break all your plugins (I paid for themes too that I was reasonably happy with - but even then, again, far too much stuff would work or not work). And frankly that was never a great feeling. On Squarespace I don't have the granular control like on Wordpress, but to me it was a fair trade to have a less customizable site for one that does what I need it to do and just works and requires zero coding. I also prefer Squarespace to Wix. Wix has more control, but if you change themes or looks then essentially you have to rebuild everything over again on Wix. And also, just in general their templates don't look good. Wheras Squarespace ones look good out of the box, even if "generic" (until you customize them a bit).
 
I am in the same boat as well; just want a basic web site purely for more professional look for my small business. I am paying someone else to design and deploy it; should I also consider Squarespace for hosting? I want to be able to upload photos and do small changes myself(add a tab etc.) Any other hosting sites that are DIY friendly?
 
krassyg72 said:
I am in the same boat as well; just want a basic web site purely for more professional look for my small business. I am paying someone else to design and deploy it; should I also consider Squarespace for hosting? I want to be able to upload photos and do small changes myself(add a tab etc.) Any other hosting sites that are DIY friendly?
Click to expand...

My personal experience.
I used Host Gator to host a Wordpress built site for a while but the site took a long time to load and looked generic anyway.

I switched over to my own HTML & CSS hosted on namecheap. The performance is pretty good.

It took a few weeks to get comfortable coding. I started with a couple Head First books, then started googling problems as I ran into them.
I would definitely recommend getting comfortable making changes, breaking, and fixing the site while you have the developer on the payroll.
Helps to add notes to the code to tell you what everything does.
 
I am still looking to hire someone for this. I do not have the time to do this myself.

I want to make the following changes to my site.

1 - Spruce up design and formatting of the site when viewed on desktop. (maybe put text into columns? I'm open to suggestion)

2 - When viewed from a mobile device : I want the images I currently have in a slide show to just be displayed vertically with a small blurb beneath.

3 - When viewed from a mobile device : I want the header menu to collapse into a button.

If there are any obvious aesthetic changes I'm open to them as well.

Please PM me if you're available.
 
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