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Anyone have a website? (platform advice - no promotion please).

Started by Magnum Valentino, June 11, 2022, 04:21:53 PM

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Magnum Valentino

I'm looking to start a website just so I have somewhere to put stuff but I don't really want the option for feedback (I don't want people to be able to 'like' my posts) so I don't just want to use Instagram or anything like that.

Can anyone vouch for a place just to stick videos, images and written bits and bobs and how much I could expect to pay?

If I could customise it somewhat so it looked like its own unique thing (and not just a Wordpress or Blogger template basically), it would be perfect for what I'm hoping to achieve.

I've put this in GB as it's more a 'help me be more active in being creative' query than a 'how does this work' query and I figure less of us go into PC Gone Mad but if Neil wants to move it no worries :-)

Thanks yousins.

QDRPHNC

Domain and hosting at somewhere like GoDaddy is pretty cheap.

Install Wordpress. Then either find a theme you like at a place like ThemeForest and customize it, or design your site from scratch with a pagebuilder like Elementor or Semplice.

If your site is going to be some kind of portfolio, then Semplice is very good - expensive up-front, but it's a one time payment, which is rare these days. Elementor is very good too, but it's $49/your and if all you're doing is displaying your work, it might be more than you need.

touchingcloth


JaDanketies

If you don't want a template then you're going to have to pay a designer. How much you pay depends on what you want. I'd just use a Wordpress template, they're totally fine. You can do a lot with a free Wordpress. Wix is the other big one but Wordpress is better.

Free wordpress doesn't let you move it from yourdomain.wordpress.com to www.yourdomain.com. You could do 'masked forwarding', so the address bar shows yourdomain.com but it displays yourdomain.wordpress.com on the screen, but Google will probably still show your website as yourdomain.wordpress.com in search results. To have it the cool way costs money.

My website was made for free by a guy who I used to work with at a web design company. He used to make websites and I would do other technical stuff like pointing the domain to our server or setting up an @yourdomain email or whatever. We charged people for our websites and we still largely used templates, you'd have to pay more for a custom website.  All I pay for at the moment is a domain with 1and1 with an email forwarder.

What's also good about a basic Wordpress theme is that the CMS makes a lot of sense. Sometimes when you pay for a bespoke website it comes with some odd CMS that is a lot trickier, or even worse, a heavily-customised Wordpress.

For a bespoke website of any standard is at least three figures. Four for anything with swishy features. You can pay for Wordpress and pay far less than that and it'll probably be just as good.

QDRPHNC

Quote from: JaDanketies on June 11, 2022, 04:50:13 PMIf you don't want a template then you're going to have to pay a designer.

Naaaah, I mean there's a bit of a learning curve, but Elementor Pro, for instance, comes with a whole library of predesigned blocks you can slot into place and customize as you see fit.

Having a designer do it is preferable, obviously, but I think with a bit of time and patience, anyone could make something decent based on the tools available these days.

Also, @Magnum Valentino, if you get a hosting package, make sure it comes with an SSL certificate.

touchingcloth

Templates on the self-hosted Wordpress are essentially undetectable as such. Wordpress blogs on the main Wordpress domain have a handful of templates you can choose from and they all look basically like a Wordpress blog, but templates themselves are no bad thing and can be used to customise a site to the point where you'd never know that it was being hosted on Wordpress as the CMS.

Magnum Valentino

Thanks everyone, I've a website now. Got over my WordPress snobbery, bought my domain and will probably pay the annual fee to have the domain name appear as the actual url too.

Cheers!