I need a little help.

I have never done any web design but my girlfriend wants to set a site up for her business.

It is a small portrait painting company so the site does not need to be super technical.

All we need is a blog, gallery, a way of sending a picture via a contact page, possibly a payment page and a few email address acounts.

The domain we want is free so how do I start the ball rolling as I see lots of site saying by the domain for £2.97 a year and then they charge £6 a month for web hosting.

What is the best way to set up cheap and easy for newbies?

cheers

What is the best way to set up cheap and easy for newbies?

I've registered domain names with UK Reg and you do pay £x per year. Hosting is thru my ISP force9 for the monthly inclusive price but that means you end up using their names. eg "http://www.davegriffiths.force9.co.uk/Leprabikeride/" rather than "www.leprabikeride.co.uk" and not sure if it excludes business.

It's dead easy to set up a web site if you have some techy knowledge but hard to set up a decent web site !!! Suggest you plan to spend some money on it by getting someone who's done it before otherwise you'll put off more people than you attract.

If you want to process payments you probably need help from a pro.

You're going to need a hand with the payment processing, but for the rest, try any of the big UK hosters. Drop me an email if you want a bit more advice.

Who are the big UK hosters?

Try 123-reg

I've recently used Domaincity recently for the same thing (jewellery business set up by a friend). They'll do the domain for about £10 for 2 years and basic web hosting for £16/year I think it is.
For your payment processing I'd go with the Paypal offering. Pretty simple to set up (I could do it so it must be), charges are reasonable and there's no ongoing monthly costs involved which seems to be the case with all the others.

My mate Chris set up the following site Hatstand Images using these people:

Photium

He's well impressed because it's a simple template-driven UI with excellent customer support.

You could also set up a WordPress blog and integrate some gallery plugins. But at the same time, I think you need to qualify the need to have a blog – is it going to be useful? Have a look at other artists sites and see what they're doing. If you definitely want one then I'd go with WordPress, and then choose someone like Zen Internet, HostPapa or NativeSpace for hosting – I recommend each of these because of price and support.

SM

Ref payment, have a look at Paypal and Google Checkout.

If you want a hand PM me

Cheers guys will draw up a spec this weekend.

For design look at .Net mag too – it has tutorials and ideas
http://www.netmag.co.uk/

spacemonkey, blog has been canned as I think it is rubbish anyway.

How much did your mate pay for the whole site?

Another vote for Reg-123.

They now do ready made ecommerce sites. See here.

Dimmadan, YGM

Here's Chris' reply:

For info (and all this is available on Photium's website) I pay £80 per year (or £7.something per month) which includes everything: hosting, support, domain name and space for up to 300 images. There are other packages that have more features and allow for more images, but they'd need to check Photium.com for prices etc.