Jump to content

Setting Up Web Site


CILONE/SK

Recommended Posts

I will admit, that beyond basic user level shit, I do not know about the behind the scenes stuff of the interwebz.

 

I want to make a professional website to expand my fine woodworking business. Nothing crazy, just a simple gallery and point of sale thing. Maybe a blog to go with it to show people the process when I am making something for them.

 

I need help.

 

Can any of you give me some guidance on where to start or what to look up?

 

I am more interested in having someone do this for me. Is there a site that does this? I really do not want to hire someone local who may or may not have the skills I am looking for. i do not want to take a chance if I do not have to.

 

Any suggestions?

 

Also, next thing, I need to know a good and cheap program for a Mac that can easily edit photos. Is photoshop the only thing?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This forum is supported by the 12ozProphet Shop, so go buy a shirt and help support!
This forum is brought to you by the 12ozProphet Shop.
This forum is brought to you by the 12oz Shop.

I am pretty OK around the interwebz, my business website is a wordpress site. Basically if you can operate microsoft work you can operate wordpress. It is extremely easy to "plug" everything into a template and make a site from there.

 

The tricky part comes to engineering and porting the website once built. This is where you may want to hire someone.

 

Also another area which can be difficult is generating organic traffic to your website. I am by no means an expert, but I can tell you this. It takes time and patients. Just follow some good youtubers' advice.

 

As for pics, google open source photo editing software. You can also edit with photobucket.

 

drue would know a bunch of this stuff I think as far as advice is concerned. I was in the same shoes as you at one point and now I have a very useful site.

 

Google is your friend.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I will admit, that beyond basic user level shit, I do not know about the behind the scenes stuff of the interwebz.

 

I want to make a professional website to expand my fine woodworking business. Nothing crazy, just a simple gallery and point of sale thing. Maybe a blog to go with it to show people the process when I am making something for them.

 

I need help.

 

Can any of you give me some guidance on where to start or what to look up?

 

I am more interested in having someone do this for me. Is there a site that does this? I really do not want to hire someone local who may or may not have the skills I am looking for. i do not want to take a chance if I do not have to.

 

Any suggestions?

 

Also, next thing, I need to know a good and cheap program for a Mac that can easily edit photos. Is photoshop the only thing?

 

 

For building a simple website... Obviously getting a host first (GoDaddy is what I use), and then find a CMS program (Content Management System) which will provide a variety of professional-looking templates that are still customizable to the point of not looking generic. There are a multitude of CMS programs... Wordpress for example is what I use for one of my sites. You can integrate it in to your page with GoDaddy, and they offer free 24/7 support if you get stuck on something.

 

Here's a list. Different CMS programs are specialized for different types of websites:

 

http://voices.yahoo.com/cms-programs-choosing-cms-program-works-143848.html

 

 

For a good quick easy photo editing program -- Adobe Lightroom is what I use. You can get that shit as a torrent for free.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not at all.

 

OK, so the forums on here use basic html for formatting (an old version) - when you are writing a comment, for example, and you want to bold a word, clicking the relevant icon it wraps the word in these tags:

 

[b ] text [/ B] (exept without the spaces) (the current format I believe is just <b></b>)

 

With Wordpress, the options to amend your site will work much like this forum's comment system - you can click icons and whatnot and not have to worry overmuch about coding. They are usually kept fairly simple for users. And you can find plug-ins to handle to point of sale thing (I assume you mean that you want to be able to sell via your site)?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

For HTML there's always glossaries online for looking up different HTML coding. There's no way I can memorize it all, so try to memorize the most common codes and go to the glossaries for reference.

 

With CMS programs, having to know HTML is less of a factor, but it's still helpful and useful as I've often used HTML to do little tweaks and alterations for the site.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I will admit, that beyond basic user level shit, I do not know about the behind the scenes stuff of the interwebz.

 

I want to make a professional website to expand my fine woodworking business. Nothing crazy, just a simple gallery and point of sale thing. Maybe a blog to go with it to show people the process when I am making something for them.

 

I need help.

 

Can any of you give me some guidance on where to start or what to look up?

 

I am more interested in having someone do this for me. Is there a site that does this? I really do not want to hire someone local who may or may not have the skills I am looking for. i do not want to take a chance if I do not have to.

 

Any suggestions?

 

Also, next thing, I need to know a good and cheap program for a Mac that can easily edit photos. Is photoshop the only thing?

 

i'm confident i'll forget something here, but i used to sorta do this work. ask away.

 

i see ads all the time for squarespace and other custom website companies. cant personally vouch for them, no experience but they would probably be a better way to go than a custom website designer. in my experience custom web designers/developers are either very expensive (especially for your purposes) or, if they're cheap, really suck. DON'T go with an agency 'cause that would be ludicrously expensive.

 

wordpress sites are reliable and generally don't suck. their CMS is pretty self explanatory - it's a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, so it's not hard or complicated to make new pages and the interface is identical to MS word.

 

their pagination works well too and building new pages is easy. [pagination = say you've got a new blog post called "check this shit out." wordpress would generally write the url as http://www.cilonerswebsite.com/blog/check-this-shit-out. the other side of this is to name everything carefully and as self-explanatory as possible. never underestimate how stupid people are].

 

pick a website colorscheme that's gentle on the eyes. make sure you've got multiple high res images per piece/product. multiple gorgeous product images = legitimacy.

 

don't cover your website in flash, as tempting as animations are.

 

make sure your website is responsive and shows up well on mobile devices. like 60% of web traffic is mobile now. act accordingly.

 

Hosting: sites that i used to work on that had godaddy as their host went down semi-frequently and did not rock. i hear good things about amazon web hosting. i dont know much else about web hosts, sorry.

 

you may come across various discussions of seo/"content"/"external links" etc. disregard almost all of it. it takes a lot of time practice and knowledge to do well and see any return for it. if you can keep a blog and 1 social media outlet (pinterest would work great for your purposes, maybe instagram too) well-updated, that's fine. don't go out and get 500 social media properties and update all of them poorly, thats shitty.

 

again, i'm sure there's things i didn't cover. ask any questions, happy to help.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

almost forgot. image editing: i use GIMP, image editing freeware. the interface is clunky but it's free. i use it to strip photos of EXIF data and do some touch ups.

 

thought: since image editing is tedious, if you've got instagram your site can just use the instagram API to pull photos directly to your site from your instagram stream. i wouldn't be surprised if other site editors let you do that too. it's slick and worth asking about.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...