I’ve been asked to start a website. I have previous on this, but back in the day when you actually got into the coding, now it looks a hell of a lot easier with many hosts offering website building.

But which one? The website is for a very specialist tradesman, So relatively straight forward stuff, but with a bit more emphasis on photos, some of them really detailed. No e-commerce stuff required.

I know a few of the basics to have such as a your own domain name, some sort of ability to score high in the search engines, mobile adapted site, but what else?

I’ve been looking at 1&1, go daddy type sites so far.

Many thanks in advance.

I think the standard answer is use wordpress. Many hosts come with it as standard (standalone or installed through fantastico). It might be worth paying for a decent theme though.

I used 1&1 for a while, if you want a fairly static website then their tools are perfectly acceptable and you can get something up pretty fast. The detail in the photos isn’t really an issue for the web-hoster aside form the images being large (thus slow to download/take up you hosting allowance), you might want to do a “medium res” on the main webpage and a click through/menu option to more detail.

Do you need Pie charts?

1&1 do a one-click wordpress site builder which is what I’ve used for this. You can also do Joomla, etc websites in the same way.

But I think most decent providers will do the same and I believe that 1&1 aren’t the very cheapest (though I have never had any trouble with them).

I paid for some hosting from ipage, and they’ve been fine so far. Good support too.

I’d second wordpress. It’s fun to go back to coding if you want, playing with the php and java bits, but if you can’t be bothered, more often than not you can find a plugin to mostly do what you want to do.

Old school, Dreamweaver works just fine 🙂

I hate to join the herd, but WordPress.

I used to write websites by hand (Notepad FTW) but WP is so much simpler and there are plugins to do almost anything.

I use rvsitebuilder

+1 for WordPress.

I wouldn’t go anywhere near GoDaddy, personally.

I wouldn’t bother with 1&1 or GoDaddy. I use Vidahost and they are fantastic. One click installs of over 10 different CMS including WP.

Their support is fantastic too. Use this code ‘STW2014’ for 10% off your hosting 🙂

TSOHost are also very good…

and fwiw I use GoDaddy and they are just fine. Like everyone else they do 1 click installs of WP etc. YMMV but I’ve had good results with them and they have been great on support whenever I needed – to the point where I called once ready with the credit card to pay for a recovery of a site when it had gone irrecoverable down and refused to restore from my backups and they happily tried to help me to sort it without using the paid recovery method.

If you want to build the site without code check out Squarespace (http://www.squarespace.com) – not the cheapest but I’ve heard good things about the site builder and the templates I’ve seen look good.

If you go the WordPress self hosted route then I’d 2nd TSO – host several WordPress sites on there and know plenty of people that use them. If you use the code 10offmbb you get 10% off (and I get a couple of quid too 🙂 )

Recently set up a site on 1&1 for a friend that already had hosting there – seems a little slow compared to other hosting I’ve used. Think they tried the site builder then came to us to do it properly 😀

If you have had some previous experience then you should be fine which ever route you go. Good luck!