As title, she’s after the best website design package; preferrably free and easy to use (for a compplete novice), although she’s prepared to pay a nominal amount if need be. Also want’s to register a .co.uk domain name; talk me through the process. Would be grateful for any help on this.

Total beginner? Go to cloudnext buy domain and hosting. Install (one click) either concrete5 or WordPress… job done.

+1 WordPress or Fasthosts.

Go to 123-reg.co.uk register the domain. Look at 5quidhost.co.uk for the hosting. You don’t need a fancy package to get great results. Learn from first principals she’ll get a much better result that she can actually maintain. Notepad++ is all you need. Avoid dreamweaver and the like.

For a good starting point try twitter bootstrap to build an actual site. If she just wants to get online try wordpress or maybe joomla you can get quite a sophisticated site without a load of coding.

If she really really wants to avoid any coding then look at adobe muse which lets you design the site and produces the markup automagically.

Don’t overlook the price of a decent lighting set up, as domestic lights won’t flatter her. And make sure the house is tidy – a mess in the background is very distracting.

I buy my domains from http://www.fasthosts.co.uk. On wordpress, which I also use, you will end up with a url such as badgerbater.wordpress.com. On fastshosts, what you do is simply redirect the url to this url, and bob’s your uncle.

What is the website for? On wordpress, you can set up a few permanent pages as well as use it as a blog.

I would set up a test wordpress site first and play around with all the options on that first. If you want in the future, wordpress blogs can be adapted by professionals to something more suited to the website’s needs.

Have a look at http://www.transitionconsciousness.org (I currently have a cycling article there so not totally off topic).

I use free These to buy domains from.

For hosting I use These for hosting because it’s free.. You do have to dial up to uplad so it’s only worth the effort if you aren’t uploading too frequently. It is only local rate charges though and I’ve uploaded entire web sites with 6 or 7 pages in less than an hour.

I use dream weaver for web sites and just cheat by getting a website template, usually from Here.

I like t captjon

It would really help to know what kind of site it is, e.g. Does she want to host ‘photos’ or sell products or service. How often update, how many pages etc

I don’t understand why people think this stuff should be free or cheap, and refuse to make any investment in it 🙁

What does she want to do with it?

I’m a web designer. Use Heart Internet for the hosting, and 123-reg for the domain name. Use WordPress for the website and then find a theme you like and install it.

Set the Permalinks so they show the postname (i.e. yourname.co.uk/pagetitle instead of yourname.co.uk?pageid=2 etc )

Install a few plugins such as All in One SEO, and optimise each page – read up a little on SEO.

Update the site regularly – good original content is king.

Then in a year or so if you’re making good money, pay a company to make you a custom theme.

Thank you for the great responses so far. She’s managed to register a domain name with Cloud Next. Basically, she is offering a service. She wants a homepage with links to other pages which will include some imagery. She wants contact with visitors to the site via email and blogs as well as setting up a paypal service. It looks as though WordPress might be a good option?

Avoid dreamweaver and the like.

Crap advice – why make life hard for yourself

WordPress is a very good option. It’s dead simple and there’s a million plugins to extend its capability.

I see little reason to design a ‘my first website’ from scratch. It’s difficult and will look like crap.

mebbe you could put ’em on a website or something

Could use WordPress but could also just use a Google site and then you would get the email at the same time (athough you can use google for email and WordPress for the other stuff) with PicasaWeb (part of Google) for the images and Blogger (part of Google) for the blogging. Domain name from one of the other services already mentioned. Paypal is seperate and easy enough to set up.

Try playing with the Google sites to see how easy it it to use. The link to a free apps account is here https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/standard/new3

Another vote for WordPress.

Fill your boots here

Urls an hosting you’ll have to pay for.

Crap advice – why make life hard for yourself

Orly? The amount of crap it generates actually makes life more difficult for you in the long run. Plus if it falls over/won’t work in different browsers you’ll have no concept of why or how to fix it. It has it’s place and that place isn’t to learn web design.

+1

I agree with random – pay nothing and you will get not much more in return.

+1 for a hosted, managed solution rather than making your own from scratch if you have no experience.

http://www.squarespace.com have a really nice solution.

I’m using serif web plus at the moment for a new site – its basic enough for beginners and can be had for a reasonably cheap price in eBay, amazon and the like.

Many thanks for all your responses. Will digest and “feel” our way forwards, taking on board comments regarding hosting and website design, etc.

Orly? The amount of crap it generates actually makes life more difficult for you in the long run. Plus if it falls over/won’t work in different browsers you’ll have no concept of why or how to fix it. It has it’s place and that place isn’t to learn web design.

they want to build a simple site, therefore a simple route would be better than trying to learn coding from scratch

Orly? The amount of crap it generates actually makes life more difficult for you in the long run. Plus if it falls over/won’t work in different browsers you’ll have no concept of why or how to fix it. It has it’s place and that place isn’t to learn web design.

they want to build a simple site, therefore a simple route would be better than trying to learn coding from scratch