Website help/design

My bro-in-law is a pro golfer and has asked me to help him develop a basic website for him, so that he can advertise himself and the lessons he provides.

I've built very basic websites before, using either hand-written HTML or free editors. Nothing more complex than just templates and text and pictures.

For his website I envisage it being more involved, with contact forms, potentially twitter feeds, links to social networking sites and maybe a paypal link so people can purchase lessons online.

Obviously I'll need to start thinking a bit more seriously about whether there are freeware editors/etc that could do this, or should I purchase something that is fairly simple to use but will allow some more complex things to be done.

I'll probably learn how to use GIMP properly for the images etc.

Any help gratefully received WATMM

Great stuff, thanks Goffer

html editors

no

use wordpress.

no need for html/css/js coding unless you really want to give yourself a headache. most webhosts have a wordpress one-click-install button nowadays. it's super simple. it will set up a wordpress installation, connect it to a database etc. then it's just about configuring it. adding widgets and plugins and so on.

you can do what you want in a day or so. probably just a few hours.

if you have a apple computer

get http://www.pixelmator.com/ instead of gimp. dirt cheap and pretty powerful.

gimp has a native osx build now but it's still kind of meh.

Yep, Wordpress is the way to go. Loads of useful extensions for forms, social media, galleries etc - plus you can delve into the code if you want to create or mod a template.

Agreed, CMS (content management systems) are definitely the way forward nowadays. All the code base is (pretty much) done for you, and you just provide the content and theme, it allows users to add content in a simple method and provides easy access to link to various social media sites.

My start into CMSs was also Drupal which was a bit of a baptism of fire but after a few tutorials it meant I had full control of the site and the modular method in which you can add sections to the site means I can add functionality without too much effort (it's what I used for http://www.ilovecubus.co.uk )

If you just want some pages with a contact form you're better off going for Wordpress. More user friendly, a lot of themes available to build on and there are a few good modules to create contact forms. Drupal allows you to structure your content into content types but setup is much more involved and it has much higher memory requirements which might trouble you on cheap shared hosting packages.

Wordpress is great for blogs, but pretty bad for pages you want to organise via menus instead of chronologically. Sure, a CMS will be quicker to learn than a programming language, but there should be one that's not designed specifically for blogging. Use the right tool for the job.

You can perfectly create pages and a navigation hierarchy with Wordpress these days. Both are built in.

  On 1/21/2013 at 1:06 PM, Ego said:

You can perfectly create pages and a navigation hierarchy with Wordpress these days. Both are built in.

Fair enough. I've seen several sites that do it badly, but that could just be confirmation bias on my part as I'm not very familiar with Wordpress.

  On 1/21/2013 at 12:52 PM, ZoeB said:

Wordpress is great for blogs, but pretty bad for pages you want to organise via menus instead of chronologically. Sure, a CMS will be quicker to learn than a programming language, but there should be one that's not designed specifically for blogging. Use the right tool for the job.

https://codex.wordpress.org/Pages

wordpress does exactly what he wants, and pretty much everything else.

Looks like I'll give wordpress a whirl. Thanks!

WordPress sounds like the best idea based on what you've described.

Concrete5 is also gaining ground and we use it at my work for loads of smaller budget projects. It has a nice wysiwyg editing mode for dumb clients.