I've a couple of domain names registered with 1and1 and I want to set-up a small website for swmbo. The site will only be a few pages with some text and photos and some sort of thumbnail gallery page. It doesn't need to be fancy, just clean and smart (she's a make-up artist) and easy to set-up/edit.

I'm not sure whether I should upgrade the 1and1 account to a hosted package with a monthly fee and use their own software or use "Takeaway Website" I've seen advertised and re-direct the traffic if that's better/easier.

Any ideas on which would be best? Or other suggestions that won't cost me more for my time and effort? i.e. learning to do this **** from scratch myself or paying someone else to do it is not an option.

I have no expertise in this field at all but my sites are hosted by -

Ryanhost.com - Affordable Website Hosting and Domain Registration - Home Page

Jim is the guy that owns the company and I get a real personal service, he's nearly always logged on to MSN and if I have an issue I call him up and he sorts it there and then, no matter what the time or day.

I have no expertise in this field at all

I've even less.

I couldn't see that they offer any sort of site-building software which I pretty much need.

Again, IMHO, unless you really want the challenge then that's best left to those that can.

There are one or two people who frequent these places that can help or Jim at Ryanhost can also do it - He built my current Octavia and Fabia sites.

Again, IMHO, unless you really want the challenge then that's best left to those that can.

There are one or two people who frequent these places that can help or Jim at Ryanhost can also do it - He built my current Octavia and Fabia sites.

This isn't a major enterprise, swmbo wants a site to "advertise" for wedding and make-up stuff she does in her spare time. I only need a couple of glorified MSWord pages with a pretty theme.

At this stage paying someone to design & build a whizzy site would be OTT.

And I am certainly not up for the challenge of trying to compete with someone who knows what they're doing.

If you've got some idea on how you want it to look and it's only going to be under 10 pages then I'd be happy to do a fellow Freedom member a favour and have a look at it for you. Send me a PM/E-mail if you're interested .

This isn't a major enterprise, swmbo wants a site to "advertise" for wedding and make-up stuff she does in her spare time. I only need a couple of glorified MSWord pages with a pretty theme.

At this stage paying someone to design & build a whizzy site would be OTT.

And I am certainly not up for the challenge of trying to compete with someone who knows what they're doing.

Whilst I agree with your sentiments, it's also the first thing people see of the offerings and in a situation where I assume design and appearance matter, getting that right is important.

I'm not suggesting you pay a small fortune but I dare say there is some here who would happily help for a small gesture or token.

Edit - beaten to the post by Ed. :P

daiking, I don't mind sorting you one out and hosting the site on my VPS. Just point your 1and1 dns records to one of my ip's.

This is a simple one I did for my parents/sisters shop ... L'artiste Hair and Beauty

thanks chaps, got some work to do at the mo but will get back to you later.

123reg offer sitebuilder which lets you DIY it inside of certain tools for a monthly fee.

I've never used it as I just code it myself, but I know people who have and are happy with it.

HTH

123reg offer sitebuilder which lets you DIY it inside of certain tools for a monthly fee.

I've never used it as I just code it myself, but I know people who have and are happy with it.

HTH

1and1 offer something similar that I've previously used a single page site (free with the domain name) for something and she's happy with the level of presentation the templates/themes/backgrounds offer. To much info on there at the moment but if I get a chance later I'll put something up for show (with the correct domain)

She hasn't finalised her 'content' yet but as I see it there will be 5 parts to the site, 4 parts are small sections of text/info and the 5th will be a gallery of a few photos. Whilst it wouldn't take an expert very long to do it it just doesn't seem worth the effort.

To be fair, it's been a while since I used word for html, but the last time I looked, it was a real disaster. It was massively bloated and worked fine with IE but of course had compatibility issues with other web browsers.

It's worth buying a crate of beer to any brisky web coder offering, because applications like Word are not designed to code html efficiently, and whilst they might work, it won't be a tidy affair.

My father's tango site (Tango South ~ Tango al Sur ~ Authentic Argentine Tango in Surrey, Hampshire & West Sussex) was done by a young chap who did it all in dreamweaver. Once done, he supplied all the dreamweaver source files so my father can update the site himself. But of course, you'd have the cost of dreamweaver on top if you wanted to be official.

To be fair, it's been a while since I used word for html, but the last time I looked, it was a real disaster. It was massively bloated and worked fine with IE but of course had compatibility issues with other web browsers.

It's worth buying a crate of beer to any brisky web coder offering, because applications like Word are not designed to code html efficiently, and whilst they might work, it won't be a tidy affair.

My father's tango site (Tango South ~ Tango al Sur ~ Authentic Argentine Tango in Surrey, Hampshire & West Sussex) was done by a young chap who did it all in dreamweaver. Once done, he supplied all the dreamweaver source files so my father can update the site himself. But of course, you'd have the cost of dreamweaver on top if you wanted to be official.

No intention of using word or something like frontpage. I'd only be putting text and pictures into an existing template. Here's an example:

made up by maria

If you're wishing for her to get indexed by search engines such as google for certain keywords then you have little hope using that site builder - it uses old technology called "frames" which essentially means that the actual web page is embedded "in the background" within the page your browser has actually loaded.

Essentially all the search engines see is an empty container, not your nice up-to-date site.

I'd be more than happy to help you out .

If you're wishing for her to get indexed by search engines such as google for certain keywords then you have little hope using that site builder - it uses old technology called "frames" which essentially means that the actual web page is embedded "in the background" within the page your browser has actually loaded.

Essentially all the search engines see is an empty container, not your nice up-to-date site.

I'd be more than happy to help you out .

That's possibly my fault for selecting frames re-direction rather than http on this example as I didn't post the directly associated url.

I'll try to get swmbo to hurry up with what she wants written and get back to you (and auroan) later in the week then.

No probs.

Danny that's a nice little site you've built there - is it a template, or something more sophisticated?

Just something simple. A bit of css that I created as a "template" for left hand nav based sites that i was going to create (but never got round to doing) and server side includes for the common components (ie header, footer and left hand nav.) Bit of photoshop here and there from some pics I'd taken and hey presto.

If you wanted a quick gander at something I'm tossing together for Stu:

You can have a quick look here

Edited 6 January, 200917 yr by yegnold

I get into a near-endless loop of username prompts, Ed.

Edit. A bit of cutting and pasting later, and I'm in.

With due respect to "Jim" that looks a WHOLE lot better than Stu's current site.

It has a whiff of a CMS about it - is it?

I'll remove the password protection in which case, it was trivial anyway

I get into a near-endless loop of username prompts, Ed.

Edit. A bit of cutting and pasting later, and I'm in.

With due respect to "Jim" that looks a WHOLE lot better than Stu's current site.

It has a whiff of a CMS about it - is it?

It's wordpress. I was going to give him a custom written CMS but wordpress did 80% of what we needed to get his current site across in to a new template. I've just had to do some work with the image uploads to get them to look nice.

Don't look too closely at all the pages - it should be obvious which ones are finished and which ones aren't

If I had to hazard a guess I'd say that's the one page that's finished

Wordpress FTW!

i can reccommend meirhosting.net, good service and i can always get hold of someone (usually the owner david) day or night anytime of the week and usually solved very quickly and a very personal service. prices are good too and good uptime.