Need help picking a website creator/hoster for small family business

chef-borjan · 12 Nov 2014 at 11:51

Hi all.

Not sure if this is the right place to post, but I trust the OC community a lot and I wanted a UK centric view on things.

Long story short, my parents are trying to set up and run a small home bakery. Customers find us on the web, like the look of a cake, send us a request for an order then we generate a paypal invoice to handle payment. Then we get them their delicious cakes.

We have a rudimentary website I clobbered together with basic IT/HTML skills hosted on blogger, but it looks like crap and we need to update it. As we only have a handful of sales a month, we would like to keep costs down. But primarily, we are looking for a website builder/hoster as well as e-commerce capabilities (although this I'm not completely sure about, as we don't want to let people actually buy cakes online in case we can't fufill the order, it needs to be given the ok first.) But importantly this all needs to be simple and easy to use, my parents will be the ones maintaining it after all!

Typing 'best cheap website builder' into google is a nightmare and the sticky above seems to be for hosting only.

Any advice? I am very new to this all...

chef-borjan · 12 Nov 2014 at 13:44

Thanks, and I might PM you later.

This is very much a side project at the moment, so no huge concerns to bring money in ASAP. SEO is important, but we are finding that we are spreading through word of mouth slowly but surely. We might get three or so orders a month at the moment, so somehow people are finding out about us!

I take it web designers would also give you all the tools and knowledge to maintain your website long after your face to face business with them is over?

chef-borjan · 12 Nov 2014 at 13:47

hargi said:
Id sugest taking a look over at Vidahost for the hosting ( I use it for all my sites and others on here recommend it ) I may have a discount code if you want to send me a message in trust.

With in vidahost's cpanel you can install wordpress witha few clicks from there you can either use its theme or go to themeforest and purchase one that you can alter.

If you want to go down the ecommerce route then there is one click installers for a few of them. But I think youd be ok with Wordpress and then use buttons to email you there requests

Thank you very much, this might be what I'm looking for. I have also dabbled in wordpress, so that might work out as well. Their prices look reasonable fairly reasonable too.

chef-borjan · 12 Nov 2014 at 13:58

Gambisk said:
http://www.squarespace.com/ job jobbed, can even play with it for free before taking out hosting options. if you look around there are normally promo codes too.

ENTER PROMO CODE: BOMBCAST

Haha, cheers, thanks I actually already had a look at that one, but prefer something in the UK.