Setting Up One's Own Website...

[Creemteez]

As some of you will be aware, I make and decorate celebration cakes.Have been doing it for a while and in the present economic climate feel that doing it on a more professional basis is the way to go.
I want to set up my own website and was wondering if any of you have any experience using these DIY-build-it-yourself sites. I have enquired of a local website building company who want £350 for a "basic" site. I have no idea if that's a good deal - perhaps one of you techy types will know.
Now you MUST bear in mind that my computamabob skills are VERY LIMITED and if you start asking me about "bytes" and stuff like that, I'm likely to burst into tears.

[zazen999]

Mine was £7 for 2 years domain name and I built it on weebly so cost zilch.

Bought the domain at 4pm, up and running and live by 6pm.

[Nicos]

We've recently had a thread on this- lot of interesting advice

Not sure where it is though....

[Nicos]

Wix is the one we use for our Gite and B&B .
Room for lots of piccies.
Free too!

[veggiechicken]

Wasn't it Jules?

[Glutton4...]

Another vote for Weebly. Being a control freak (yeah, honest! ) I wanted control over content, and didn't want to pay someone else, as I knew I'd be making regular changes. When you buy your domain name, try to get both dot-com and dot-co-dot-uk suffixes, and link the two, that way you won't lose half your business to another company with the same name.

[Creemteez]

Uh-ha,uh-ha, I hear what you are saying people, but have NO IDEA as to how to buy a Weebly or if indeed that's what I need to do. Domain? Is that computer-speak for what I'll call myself???
You're going to have to talk me through this one in WORDS A SIX-YEAR OLD WILL UNDERSTAND. (Actually the average six year old would probably know EXACTLY what you were talking about!- Sniff!)

[Nicos]

step 1
Turn on computer.....

[Glutton4...]

It's gonna be a long night...

[Nicos]

opens bottle of white....

( that's step 2 by the way! )

[Creemteez]

Now you're talking! and Yup!

[zazen999]

Chris knows the best places to get cheap domains...

[Creemteez]

I'll look forward to hearing from him (her???) - as long as he (she???) speaks in little words....

[Glutton4...]

Just do a search for 'cheap domain names' and see what you can come up with. I was really ditzy about it until I tried it - eventually it all fell into place. Just!

[chris]

.co.uk's - isn't much in them - I tend to use ukreg (part of fasthosts now mind) - pretty much as what zaz pays - 6.93 for 2 years (2 years min initial registration anyway).

.coms? I have an old business account from when I used to be big into the "web" industry - with enom - so tend to still use them for whenver I buy gtlds (.com, .net, .org etc)...haven't checked for a while, but they were around $8/year at their standard pricing. enom.com was the url. Failing that, no doubt most webhosts now will have a hosting package with a free domain as they're pence (literally) for them to buy.

Website wise, as above + don't rule out wordpress, it was a blogging engine, but now due to all the addons it's a very powerful CMS (content management system) if you want it to be

In terms of what domain to get, it doesn't matter now-a-days if you get a .com, .org, .co.uk, .uk.com, .biz, etc - the "majority" of the work to get your site ranked high on search engines is to use a domain thats relevant to your business - i.e. if your business is called 'CT Cakes' then something like ctcakes.com, ct-cakes.co.uk etc all help when people are searching for you as your name is already in the URL - sort of like bonus points. If you're not trying to drive sales from your site then really the general advice is to describe what you do, well, describe each page well, and describe your images (making use of alt tags, title tags, etc). If you want to drive sales from your site, then getting someone to do some proper SEO on your site is worth its weight in gold (using a reputable business/individual, obviously). I don't do much now, as I've enough on my plate - but happy to help with any queries you might have.

There's a couple of "web" folk on here too, so rather than a PM if you post in the thread you'll gain a wider audience!