Trying to find a web designer

[Wesley Irwin]

Hi,
I have lived in BA for a few months now and am trying to build my own website so that I can make it down here, but I have no idea how, other than buying a domain name. Can you help me??? Advice??? Classes?? I am willing to trade goods/services if necessary.

Best,
Wes

 

[Eternalnewbie]

Unless you are capable of and want to build a site from scratch, and one suspects from the nature of your question that you don't want to build a site from nothing, then you can use any of a large number of drag-drop, plug-play, fill-in-the-blanks site that do most of the work for you with templates.

All the usual suspects essentially design and support the site for you: WordPress, Typepad, Google, etc. Yahoo Small Business Solutions will put up a site for you if you buy your domain name from them and let them host the site.

Putting up a web site is so easy that I think every third person on the planet has one.

 

[Sleuth]

Without knowing much about what you are doing, I'd suggest using Wordpress. It started as blog software, but is much more than just that now. It's a great CMS (content management system).

You can get a large number of pre-designed templates that you can then customize for whatever you want. This will help you save on web design costs. Check out woothemes.com and themeforest.com for some example themes.

It takes a little bit of a learning curve, but it is not too steep.

 

[A&A]

Wes, what kind of site are you looking for? e-commerce, corporate, blog? I design websites, logos, etc.

Send me a PM with some more information and I can let you know what I can do.

 

[mcaffa]

I also recommend going with WordPress. It is very easy to set up and manage, and there are so many great, free templates to choose from.

If you decide to hire a local designer, be careful of Flash. They LOVE to build flash websites down here but flash can make it very hard for your site to be found in Google and other search engines. Make sure the site is in html and try to optimize meta tags, urls and content for SEO.

 

[A&A]

Also, Flash does not display on many (if not all) mobile devices (iphones, ipads, blackberry).

 

[MDB]

If you host with streamline.net they give you an online website builder a child could use for pretty ok results. Very cheap.

 

[Robino]

I also recommend going with WordPress. It is very easy to set up and manage, and there are so many great, free templates to choose from.

If you decide to hire a local designer, be careful of Flash. They LOVE to build flash websites down here but flash can make it very hard for your site to be found in Google and other search engines. Make sure the site is in html and try to optimize meta tags, urls and content for SEO.

That's funny what you say about flash sites because that's exactly the idea I had while browsing some BA webdesign agencies websites. I'm almost on Steve Job's side on this issue, flash kind of sucks and is mainly about showing off with tiring effects and unnecessary interactional content.

WordPress is a powerful tool with a great community and tons of free themes that actually look great and can be personalized pretty easily with close to no coding skills.

If you want to build an e-shop Shopify seems to be the easiest way but there's also Prestashop. This socks shop is a nice looking example of what you can achieve with it.

 

[Coco]

Wes: what's your budget and objective? I might be able to help.