I need to create a fairly basic business website, maybe four or five pages with some nice images, a few links and contact details. I’ve never created a website before, but I’ve had loads of people telling me if I’m even vaguely interweb/tech savvy I should be able to do it myself.
Is this true? If it was a personal website I’d definitely give it a go, but this will be a potential customer’s first point of contact so I’m keen for the first impression to be a good one. I’m also a bit dubious about using a ‘template’ style website for the same reason.
Thanks!

If you are worried about it then a pro may be the best option.

You’re right that it is the first point of contact for customers and a cheap template site might give off the wrong impression.

On the other hand with a bit of design flair and using a content management system like Joomla you can get some simple good looking sites setup in no time.

Ask for some quotes, should give you a better frame of reference.

Not only is it important in terms of first impression, but don’t forget that you can probably use that same time to better effect in some other aspect of the business.

A good off the shelf template is better than a badly-designed bespoke site and there are plenty of bad web designers out there. There are also bad templates. There is therefore no magic right/wrong answer.

One thing to remember is that content management is important. There’s no point paying someone to make a site if you then need to pay again every time you want a change. A site with content that never changes is not a site people will want to visits. It will also affect search ranking. This is why some of the blog type templates are good because at least it makes it very easy for a non-techy to update content regularly.

Have you had a look/play with any of the DIY solutions? Wix.com, squarespace both have great looking templates and I’m told are both pretty easy to use.

WordPress or even blogger are perfect for simple sites with a few pages. Easy to personalise and update. Both free bit you can pay about £100 for a ‘theme’ on a WordPress site ( basically makes it look a bit snappier).

I use Photium for my two sites and also have a couple of Blogger blogs. Photium is template based, very cheap (£7 a month) and easily customised. The customer service is the best in the business which is useful if it’s your first site…

Feel free to have a look (or not). 🙂

north east wedding photographer

specialist dog photography north east

I’ve had loads of people telling me if I’m even vaguely interweb/tech savvy I should be able to do it myself.
Is this true?

It’s true as far as it goes, any gibbon can cruft a couple of functional pages together and go “hey, website!” For a site fronting a business however, do you really want some hand-rolled DIY effort being representative of your company?

Plus, no offence, but if you have to ask the question then really you already have the answer. Nothing to stop you giving it a go and seeing how you get on, of course; so long as you can look at it critically when you’ve done. I’m fairly sure there’s plenty here who will be happy to give it a mauling critical appraisal.

Feel free to have a look (or not).

north east wedding photographer

If you’d paid someone to design your site, you might not have “tick_image” placeholder text on your front page… (-:

north east wedding and dog photography, surely that’s just one job!

Cougar – Moderator
Feel free to have a look (or not).
north east wedding photographer

If you’d paid someone to design your site, you might not have “tick_image” placeholder text on your front page… (-:

Nor would your metadata stuff appear on the front page, or your indemnity links take the visitor away from your site, or your gallery image captions mostly be oddly truncated… And I only looked at two pages!

There’s more to building a website than stringing together some HTML…

Thanks for the replies…I’ll take a look at some of the template options suggested, and also investigate costs to get someone to create one for me.
Another question – if I pay someone to create a website, are they going to expect to have an ongoing contract to update it as necessary? I’d rather do that myself.

If you’d paid someone to design your site, you might not have “tick_image” placeholder text on your front page… (-:

I’m not seeing that on phone or laptop – can you expand please?

Julian – nothing wrong with having non-spammy keyword text on the home page / any page so far as I know. There’s also a field for every page in which to input keywords, metadata etc (invisible to viewers). The image titles aren’t there to be read really – more for SEO purposes.

I’ve built websites. I would do my own but id be sure to get external unbiased review. I wouldn’t recommend a non savvy person risk their income on one they made though.

Same as anything else. Pay someone good, you’ll get something good. Do it yourself and you could do a better job than someone who is crap at their job.

Julian – nothing wrong with having non-spammy keyword text on the home page / any page so far as I know

Looks a bit pants though… Better in metadata where the bots can read it and we can’t (unless we are sad enough to do ‘View source’)