Hello all, I am a graphic designer and have a friend that recently bought a new farm/stable and wanted me to help design a web page for them. Is it possible for me to learn this? I am not looking for anything complicated, the sites they like are really basic, like this for example, http://www.dannywarrington.com/home/ I designed a page 10 years ago, but have forgot a lot since then and am sure things have changed a lot also. Where is the best place for me to start? I see a bunch of websites that offer basic templates and let you set up your own page, but do you really have any freedom in this? If I don't go with something like this, where do you think I will find the best place to host the webpage and images/files etc. I would like to give this a go, but sometimes the getting started seems impossible. Any help you have to get me headed into the right direction will be deeply appreciated. Thanks, Matt
The site you mention is done in Karma CMS, I think someone with your skills would find it limiting. You might search for cms template like joomla, drupal, wordpress etc. to find something flexible in design yet still mostly simple to operate.
Are they looking into a content management system? There's Wordpress, very easy to set up but not the simplest cms. I found this very simple cms called CouchCMS, a bit more complex to set up (edit the html code) but then once that is done, the client has the simplest interface ever to modify his content. There's lots of CMS out there if that's what you want. If not you can learn HTML/CSS and do it from scratch or buy a HTML template and simply change the content.
I can help you to create it for free... I'll create a script from scratch for you.. Just PM me with Yahoo! Messenger / Skype / MSN id and we'll talk there to discuss more.
For someone new, I would heartily recommend Wordpress. It functions both as a basic CMS and blogging platform. There are literally thousands of templates to choose from. The software is also very simple to install.
Thank you for your recommendations, I am going through them now trying to figure out which would be the best for me to try. I will probably either try to keep up with the management of it for them, or like you said, try to find something that would allow them to manage it for themselves. Doesn't Wordpress require you to use web addresses that end in a .wp or something similiar? I would like to get them a .com if possible. I would like to find something that would let me play around with some ideas without having to put down money first, but I might have to bite the bullet and see which is the most user friendly and pay. Keep ideas coming, I would have never have found some of these site's without everyone's help here. Thanks much, Matt
There are two options with Wordpress. You can either set up a blog on worpress.com where your blog address would be <name>.wordpress.com or, preferably, you download Wordpress from wordpress.org and install it on whatever domain you register www.<domainname>.com. The first option is completely free. The second option would require you to purchase both a domain and web hosting.
I have a propotion for you.. I'll create you a subdomain on one of my domains and you can work there before you get your domain name and hosting. You can install scripts there and request my help whenever you want. This way you doesn't need to buy something until you like what you'll use.
I agree with the advice given DigitalPoint member friends here, in building a website to market your products using Wordpress as a tool for starting.