Comments | jarrow: website help

jarrow

website help

Jan 19, 2010 22:11

Hi! So, you may have heard me talk about my buddy James's album. You know, once or twice. *cough* (The official US launch is coming very soon, hang tight!) In preparation for the launch, he needs to get an official website going. We've looked into purchasing a designer or even a template, and we can't find anything under $400. We are oh so poor and ( Read more... )

james

Comments 10

ldthomps January 20 2010, 14:15:18 UTC

I'm not really websavvy, but I know that one of my professional organizations uses webhero.com as their host, and it's cheap and reliable. You could use templates you find elsewhere, probably, and I find updating things through their web interface easy with my rudimentary knowledge of html. Good luck!

jarrow January 21 2010, 05:44:41 UTC

Thanks for the input!

laurashapiro January 20 2010, 15:20:12 UTC

You can get going for a lot less than that:

1) Sign up at Wordpress.com for free.
2) Pick one of their 50 or so free templates.
3) Ask a friend who's good with graphics (ahem) to design a custom header for you.
4) Have a launch party.

I used a canned Wordpress theme for P.'s blog and just added a shiny delicious new header image. It was super-easy.

Wordpress is also super-easy for the site owner to manipulate, add text to, etc. It's set up as a blog, which is great for your news section, but you can quickly add stand-alone pages, images, videos, etc.

There is a WP e-commerce module, too.

If you want something fancier, you can get a cheap hosting account (Dreamhost starts at $9.99/month, I think) and install Wordpress locally. That will give you more flexibility but the software and templates and everything are still free free free.

jarrow January 21 2010, 05:45:02 UTC

Thanks, darling! You're the second person who's pointed me in that direction, so I will certainly check it out. *mwah*

tipofaspoon January 20 2010, 15:38:41 UTC

A place for snazzy flash templates for cheap-ish is bludomain.com. I believe their cheapest level (which still has a lot of features) is $50-99. Not sure about all the details but I've had some friends who were pretty happy with them.

Otherwise I can always help. I've built plenty of websites and can make it so that it's easily updated after everything is set up. Let me know.

jarrow January 21 2010, 05:45:14 UTC

Thanks, buddy! I appreciate it!

agentotter January 20 2010, 21:46:21 UTC

I cannot code for the life of me these days (oh technology, you have gotten away from me in such a spectacular fashion), and the suggestions you've gotten to use Wordpress or similar are really quite smart. Though I used to run my own servers and whatnot, I'm now hosting all of my sites through remote companies (my photography is on smugmug, and my blog is on Dreamwidth)... it's just so much easier.

What I can help with, though, is design stuff. If you have photos and a basic idea of what you want it to look like, I can build a spec. Or if you're going to use one of the many services that allows you to build from templates, I can just make you a new header graphic and customize colors.

jarrow January 21 2010, 05:45:29 UTC

Ooh, thank you! I just might take you up on that!

kirbybits January 21 2010, 18:47:34 UTC

another option, if you aren't happy with one of the free templates on Wordpress, is buying a template like Thesis, which lets you do a lot more in terms of tweaking/customizing: http://diythemes.com/

(example of Thesis can, SHOCKINGLY, be found on the Companda's blog, which is the only reason I know this at all: http://www.tinysubversions.com/)