Resources for Website Building/Hosting?

[Elheru Aran]

Hey,

So for a (potential) small business, I am looking at setting up a website.

Money is a major consideration here, as is simplicity. I need a free host of some kind.

I also need some form of free/cheap website builder software that I can use to put together the pages. I'll gladly accept suggestions on how to better build the site, as well.

Thanks all for your help.

[spooky spice]

Googling will bring up a raft of free hosting options. You'll more than likely have to pay a fee for the domain name, and end up getting emails from people telling you, you have to pay them for that name (most of which are spam/scam)

They usually come with templates that you can use to set up a site. I've done it a few times, it's not too hard

If you find a hosting site, and want some help, PM me

[kaeneth]

Suggestions:

http://www.namecheap.com/ <- for domain name registration only (Less than $10/year)

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing <- for hosting, for a very small site (which is probably what you have) you can generally have the site hosted for less than $4-5/month. You should be making money before you get past the $5 a month mark.

http://www.nvu.com/

That is just my two cents. Free hosts look unprofessional as hell.

[Sarevok]

I recommend Hostgator. They are a renowned company and their offerings start at $3.96/month. But the real reason I recommend them is not the price but their great support. If this is your first time setting up a professional website it is extremely helpful to have timely and competent tech support.

I also need some form of free/cheap website builder software that I can use to put together the pages. I'll gladly accept suggestions on how to better build the site, as well.

These days CMS software is used to build very professional looking websites in very little time. What CMS you choose depends on what kind of site you are looking for. In general though Wordpress is a good starting point. With it's plethora of themes and plugins you can use it to build anything from a company website to an ecommerce portal.

Most CMS based solutions are free though if you want extended functionality you may sometimes have to buy the module that provides it.

[Elheru Aran]

Hmm... um... what's CMS?

Hostgator does sound like a decent option. Support is always great...

Anyway, I decided to use a Facebook page for the moment given that it's strictly a hobby right now, not really something I can turn into a business per se. Not terribly professional, no, but I've only sold one item so far, I can't really say it's all that much of a business

[Dave]

Hmm... um... what's CMS?

Content Management System. It's a website designed to make designing and filling your website easier. Examples include wordpress (as mentioned) Drupal, Joombla, and many others.

[Eleas]

I second the need for a CMS.

The act of putting together a regular webpage is beyond easy, but if you just create a static webpage, you'll run into problems down the road. Namely, the experience of having to hard-code every last fucking change on every last fucking page will quickly begin to grate on you.

What a CMS does is act as a wraparound, a skeleton for the site if you will. You design the site to look like what you want it to look, and then the content -- the actual text and images of the articles -- is delivered by the CMS. Whenever you want to change stuff, you simply log on to the CMS just like you would on a forum, make the changes, press the submit button, and you're done.

Take it from someone who ran a very popular niche site for upwards of ten years: you don't want to go the static route. The workload tends to grow exponentially with time.

[Darth Wong]

Technically, even phpbb could be regarded as a CMS of sorts, albeit one that is narrowly designed for one specific purpose.

I actually made up my own crappy little CMS for my personal page many years ago, because I needed a "wrapper" to format every page identically and maintain menus and links. It worked pretty well (coded in PHP), but then I added a small blog and that ran on Wordpress, so I decided that if part of my personal page would run on Wordpress, then all of it might as well run on Wordpress.

[Eleas]

Technically, even phpbb could be regarded as a CMS of sorts, albeit one that is narrowly designed for one specific purpose.

I actually made up my own crappy little CMS for my personal page many years ago, because I needed a "wrapper" to format every page identically and maintain menus and links. It worked pretty well (coded in PHP), but then I added a small blog and that ran on Wordpress, so I decided that if part of my personal page would run on Wordpress, then all of it might as well run on Wordpress.

Just out of curiosity, did you separate content from code, or was it just a set of included files strung together like beads on a string?

[Eleas]

I hate most CMSs. I find them difficult to use and learn. It also strikes me as somewhat perverted to install several megabytes of code that runs every time someone accesses your page just to display a few dozen kilobytes of text that probably won't change often...

The most useful part of a CMS in one line of bash shell:

Code: Select all

for i in *.html; do cat header.html $i footer.html | gzip > site/$i.gz; done

Eleas' concern defeated.

Not entirely, though your point is taken. This way still fails to provide separation of content, presentation and mechanics.

I used to have a guy who loved to submit his stuff as MSWord formatted text pasted straight into the code. Manual cleanup. Every time. Not fun.

[Darth Wong]

Technically, even phpbb could be regarded as a CMS of sorts, albeit one that is narrowly designed for one specific purpose.

I actually made up my own crappy little CMS for my personal page many years ago, because I needed a "wrapper" to format every page identically and maintain menus and links. It worked pretty well (coded in PHP), but then I added a small blog and that ran on Wordpress, so I decided that if part of my personal page would run on Wordpress, then all of it might as well run on Wordpress.

Just out of curiosity, did you separate content from code, or was it just a set of included files strung together like beads on a string?

No, it wasn't just a string of included files. That would be lame. There was real PHP code for building the header, the footer, the menu side-bar, the navigation links, etc. The only straight include-file was the body of text in each page. When I added more pages, it would automatically add them to the menus and insert them in navigation links. It worked pretty well for many years, but it seemed pointless once I had part of the site running on WordPress.

[Eleas]

I don't know what you mean by mechanics though. Changing the content is as simple as editing the source files.

Yeah, I probably ought to have clarified. I usually want to separate all the code (up to and including spurious HTML tags) from the text (which individual authors are allowed to touch). The labor of having to teach contributors (yet again) that no, it actually does matter if you forget to close a tag, stopped being fun long ago.

That's why I like the idea of sticking pure text with minimalist markup in the database. On-load parsing is seldom enough work to seriously worry the server, at least not at the modest levels of traffic I've generated.

Aye, I've had things like that before. Painful. I blame WYSIWYG editors though, because what you see isn't what you get once you consider changing templates! Unless you litter every inline style imaginable on every element... which breaks the whole idea of changing templates.

You may have a point there. The alternative is the TeX way, i.e. semantic markup, and I vastly prefer it. As a method, it is at least comparatively easy to pound into the skulls of collaborators, and is a lot less likely to provide a Christmas tree aesthetic.

Let me show you a thing from a client's Wordpress database (there's several items like this in there):

<snip>

I fucking loathe Wordpress. Look at that shit. The actual content?

<snip>

Again, that's from the content database, not the presentation template!

Okay, that's fucked up. I've not done much with Wordpress yet, meaning that I in my naivete assumed it kept its content database clean of such crap.