Novice website creation - advice please!

[NotAGolf]

My friend is looking to start up his own business. He’s an electrician and wants a website to basically advertise his services. He’s only looking for something basic. Just 3-4 pages with a bunch of images and a bit of text describing what he does, contact info etc. It’s not going to need to be updated much more than once a year and even then would be a change of contact info or something simple.

Neither of us have any web design experience. How much work would it be to knock up a site like this and what is involved?

I did a little hunting around and I thought that we could get a domain name and hosting from vida host or someone similar. Then use wordpress and use one of the existing templates to just tailor to his requirements. As far as I can tell the only charges here would be the domain name registration (which is free with vida), and the yearly hosting fee, which should be less than £40 as he won’t be getting much traffic/bandwidth usage so could get away with one of the lighter packages.

Does that sound like a sensible plan? Is there anything I’ve overlooked? The one thing I’m concerned with is the maintenance side of things. I don’t mind helping him getting it up and running, but will there be much involved with keeping the site up and running? I imagine not as he won’t be looking to change anything, and as long as he pays the hosting fees everything should just keep ticking over right?

Out of interest, if we decide it’s not worth the effort and look to pay to get it done, how much would we be looking at for a simple site like this? Would somewhere like the 1&1 generic website be worth looking at?

Thanks for any advice.

 

[GravyMonster]

Wordpress is deinfitely the way forward here. The only maintainance I could see you needing is text updates for SEO purposes, which would only take 5 minutes and cost nothing. Hosting sounds bang on too.

If you did decide to pay someone, you're looking at about £200 to setup if you use a one man band - assuming you already have a template. If you want a template designed just for your site you can double that at the very least. Most likely 4 figures if you want the template designed and built to any decent standard.

 

[radderfire]

If you need a simple and free introductory web presence, consider using a Google Places listing.

Unless you are interested in learning web design, I wouldn't bother trying to do it yourself, it will be too much work for too little return.

If he's an electrician, he should be able to afford to spend a bit on his website, so find web designs that you like the look of and get some quotes.

1&1 are not good for customer service, and their prefab website offering won't be nearly as good.

Rgds

 

[NotAGolf]

Thanks for the advice folks. I've just downloaded wordpress and setup an offline site. I've actually mocked up pretty much all I need overnight it was that easy to use.

The only thing I need to work out is the security side of thing so that I'm the admin and no one else can access it. I'm assuming this happened automatically when I installed wordpress and made my site but I don't want to put it on the web for someone to come along and ruin it!!

 

[sniffy]

You can only access the CMS functionality once you have logged in as a user with sufficient privledges. When your wordpress session expires you can login via www.herp.com/wp-login.php

 

[Tyron]

Wrdpress is a very good idea.