Web design and hosting questions

dreadpiratebill

dreadpiratebill

Fighter
Yeah so my boss is asking me to head up our new company website and in the words of Dr. McCoy "Damit Jim, I'm a prosthetist, not a web designer." Apperently being good with computers means that its my problem now.

So heres the basic situation. He want to know what our options are having a new web site made. Very open ended. His goal is to have a good looking web site that we have the ability to update the information/pictures/videos on in house, but he dosent care if we have to pay someone to build it initialy.

The main thing is not spending a billion dollars on web design and still being able to make content updates in house.

So yeah, any advice.
--bill

PS: I already tried explaining that this is outside anything I am immediatly familiar with. Its still my problem.
 
Thx. Ive been looking hard at wordpress, but I wasnt sure if it was something more situated for blogs or if it would work for our needs. Good to hear Im at least on the right track.

Ill do more checking. ILl likly have more questions.

--bill
 
Hows it for uploading pictures and video?
--bill
 
Got it. Thx. Ill continue reading the user guides, see what I can do.
--bill
 
Speaking of Word Press, if anyone who understands it better than me (which would be just about everyone) would like to make a few bucks designing a new web page for me, send me a message.
 
So on the topic of hosting: you recomend godaddy, ok cool. So lets assume I am going to go ahead and build this new site using wordpress and I M going to take your advice and use go daddy for the hosting.

1: will I need to install the wordpress software server side through my log in, or would the server space come with the wordpress software pre installed? Having trouble figuring this out from the company's info.

2: once set up, I can see how it can be used , without comments, as a content manager and then I am assuming that things like the layout can be adjusted to kinda "hide" the more blog oriented aspects of the page constuction.

--bill
 
There are lots of nifty themes that you can download, many for free. You can pick what parts you want to use, and generally use someone else's work to do most of the hard stuff for you. That'll change the look of the site significantly without making it much harder to deal with on your end.
 
I would suggest a more general Content Management System (CMS) like Joomla! over a specialized "CMS" blog-based software like Wordpress.

Joomla! was written and created from the ground up to do just what you're asking for (and has more built-in useful stuff, imho), where Wordpress is a specialized CMS that started out as blogging software that has gotten a little more complicated as they have added more CMS-based options to it. Further, the back-end of a CMS is build to handle what you're asking about -- pictures, videos, and other forms of multimedia.

For reference:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... nt_systems

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog_software

Godaddy offers LAMP and WAMP server configuration options as a part of their service (the plan I use, anyway), and they also have MySQL databases and hosting included as well. They have Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal, and other "packages" that you can have them install for you automatically, and as others have mentioned, the setup through their service is pain free -- just follow the prompts and directions. :)

A really good way of getting a feel for what they can do is to look at websites that use the software -- a quick google search should yield some informative results.

Here are some wordpress sites:

http://wordpress.org/showcase/tag/business/

And some Joomla! sites:
http://community.joomla.org/showcase/si ... iness.html

And Drupal:
http://www.drupalshowcase.com/

These are all mostly community-driven pieces of software, this is important when you consider site design because when you work with them enough, it's pretty easy to tell if a site was designed using Wordpress or Joomla! because those templates tend to look very similar -- and people don't use them, necessarily, to come up with design/layout. So by looking at examples, you can get a general feel for what your site will look like (Joomla! and Wordpress have editable HTML, PHP, and CSS; I'm not sure about Drupal, haven't really played with it much). It is also important when you factor in support services and the expected lifetime of a plug-in or module -- the only way they continue on is if it's really popular; at which point they are generally integrated into the software itself anyway, or at least included in the download packages.
 
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