I’m a member of a sports club that pays a third party a reasonable sum for a fairly basic and quite crap looking website. It’s just a few pages – fixtures, results, how to join – that sort of thing. How viable is it to do our own? How would you do that? Is it something a generally competent person can do, or does one need to be a bit of a boffin?

Just words and pictures? No functionality? (Forms, membership etc)

Just use Wix. Yeah, you’ll work it out okay.

Rachel

Given enough time, you can do it. That’s quite a simple website what you describe, and, assuming you know nothing – could probably be done in a weekend using Wix or Squarespace etc.

Better geeks will be here in the morning.

Yes, pretty simple. A page of fixtures, a page for results, a page for minutes, a page with contact details. No need to take payments for anything.

You can probably do everything you need on fixtures live for free
Edit: http://w.fixtureslive.com/features.aspx?productid=16

I could do that, and whilst I’m a software geek I’m not a website designer (I’m farming that sort of thing off to other people in what I’m currently working on, but then ours is way, way more complex than yours). If you’re using one of the standard tools then the bit which requires skill is the design rather than any software geekery.

Ok thanks, sounds promising.

wordpress has lots of plugins. Pretty intuitive.

WordPress is awesome but I wouldn’t recommend it to a complete beginner. There’s just too many ways of doing things, flexibility is it’s strength, but can be quite bewildering. After about five years of using it I still don’t fully understand the whole blog and posts thing…

I am a bit special tho. OP might not be quite so “challenged”.

The OP still sometimes marvels at the touch screen technology on his iPad 🙂

Squarespace is better than Wix.
Or you could do WordPress and pay a freelancer off PeoplePerHour to set it all up and add the functionality you want through plugins.
Or you could just set up a FB page with open access.

WordPress is pretty easy in my experience. Get a template and setting it up if you’re not too fussy. I’ve written my whole website from scratch, without a template, by googling how to do things and being stubborn. I didn’t have any choice because I had no money. That took time but just buying a template and setting it us is pretty easy if you are at all computer literate. Have a go, it’s quite fun.

I’ve done a few wordpress sites with reasonable results, I’m not a computer geek at all but do have many years’ experience using content systems for work.

I’d agree WP might be a bit too involved for a novice. Something a bit more basic and drag-and-drop could be better.