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I'm a coder so I still do everything by hand: find a web hosting company, write the HTML by hand, layout in CSS, graphics in photoshop and/or stock photos, hack it all together, get the email forms working, etc. But I figure it's 2011, and there's got to be easier ways to do this stuff. What's the easiest way to get a small business website online? Any thoughts or opinions are greatly appreciated! |
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My gut reaction was the same as Zuly's - use Wordpress... but when I saw you wanting something even more 'out of the box', the thing that springs to mind is Drupal Gardens. It has recently come out of beta and wraps up a lot of the complexity of managing a drupal site. There is still a bit of a learning curve, but then it is a very capable CMS. I think this is the sort of thing you are looking for... Another great 'website-in-a-box' service is Ning - which might be more suitable if you are interested in setting up communities with strong social features. Less setup involved than with Drupal Gardens - Ning's strapline is 'all in a matter of clicks'. But you know, having thought more about it... I'd still go with Wordpress. Being a developer you can not only tweak the themes to your hearts content, but you can write plugins and widgets as well which will give you the flexibility you need as you grow and scale your business. If you are familiar with PHP and MySQL you can write some great plugins that will turn a CMS/blog website into a dynamic business portal. Existing plugins are great - they include eCommerce solutions and lots of niche-specific applications. Don't write off Wordpress. |
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The quickest way to get your website up is to use WordPress, hosted by another company like GoDaddy or Rackspace. There is an extensive collection of WordPress themes, and plugins that let you customize your website fairly quickly, and with little effort. Edit (In response to your comment):
Have a look at Posterous. I think that may be what you are looking for. Setting up the website is super quick and easy, and they let you use custom domains. This is a really quick way to get a website up, but keep in mind that it won't look like a professional business website. Another option may be FatCow. They are a hosting provider, but they also offer "Point & Click Site Building Tools". From their website:
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You might also want to try Blogger. You can start with yourname.blogger.com, and as you feel more comfortable, you can move it to your own domain and ultimately to your own hosting. However, once on your own hosting, I'd get on WordPress. Many hosts have this as a 1-click installation option. Then, you just log in and modify the pages as needed. If just getting started, it's nearly as easy as setting up a facebook page. |
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You can try Google Sites: https://sites.google.com/ If you own a Mac you can use iWeb and one of their predefined templates. Anyway, I would go with wordpress and it has already been suggested. |
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Your definitely go is Wordpress using a Theme from either ThemeForest or WooThemes. With this approach it will look professional and will work as you expect it to work, easy to maintain, online in minutes. |
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DotNetNuke (DNN) is also a quick way to get a site up & running. I've used to build several sites for my company & some of our clients. They also have a large selection of modules and skins available on http://www.snowcovered.com/ that are reasonably priced. If you need to get fancy with custom development, you can write your own modules or download the entire source code from CodePlex too. The primary difference between DNN & WordPress is that DNN uses Microsoft SQL Server instead of MySQL & requires IIS. |
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