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I am writing to find out if there are those who have built their own web site (being novice - no technical expertise) that was functional. Any recommendations for web hosting, sites to purchase domain names, and any general tips on building a web site?
I have gotten some quotes for a web site, they can be pricey, thousand dollars and up.
For my purposes, the web site would have a blog and an e-commerce (selling ebook).
I am interested in tackling this project. Thanks.
06-03-2016, 11:37 PM
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n/a posts
Do you want to do coding or just have something that works?
If you just want something up and running for cheap, SquareSpace looks nice, is cheap, and easy.
Squarespace as far as I can tell is proprietary. One thing to be aware of about proprietary sites is the content cannot be moved elsewhere easily. 5 years down the road if you want to move another host you may have to manually copy the content of every page and manfully import it into something else.
This can be a ridiculous amount of work. I had to move a Netsol site once. The only way to get to the original images was to go into the panel, click the thumb to bring up the full image and then right click to save it. I spent an entire day doing something that would take me about 10 seconds with FTP access to the files.
Worse case with this is Squarespace abruptly goes out of business and you wake up one morning to find your site is no longer active and you have no way to recover it.
If you want to do this yourself and have full control over everything look at Drupal or Wordpress. It will be more involved because you need to maintain the software. However if you want to move to another host you just move the files and the database, done.
Hostgator is good for me for the last 6 years. Godaddy is the site I use to buy domain names but it gets a little more complicated to buy your domain on one site (godaddy) and use it on another (hostgator).
I think you have to decide how much time you want to invest in this online thing. If you dont want to be bothered, then pay someone else to do it, otherwise if you want to save money or want to know you can do it yourself if things get expensive, then you need to invest time in learning about it all.
If you are doing this for your own ebook then maybe selling it through a website which specialises in this alone. Then you can concentrate on the blog bit with wordpress-like software.
Or, if you are doing this to make money and selling someone elses ebook, then you will only need a blog, a landing page and links to the ebook from there.
You also probably need to map out how your website will look and the navigation. That way you will know how many pages you will need and the relationship between the pages etc.
Squarespace as far as I can tell is proprietary. One thing to be aware of about proprietary sites is the content cannot be moved elsewhere easily. 5 years down the road if you want to move another host you may have to manually copy the content of every page and manfully import it into something else.
This can be a ridiculous amount of work. I had to move a Netsol site once. The only way to get to the original images was to go into the panel, click the thumb to bring up the full image and then right click to save it. I spent an entire day doing something that would take me about 10 seconds with FTP access to the files.
Worse case with this is Squarespace abruptly goes out of business and you wake up one morning to find your site is no longer active and you have no way to recover it.
If you want to do this yourself and have full control over everything look at Drupal or Wordpress. It will be more involved because you need to maintain the software. However if you want to move to another host you just move the files and the database, done.
There are free (or cheap) utilities that will download an entire web site for you including images.
Also, an FTP account/login for the web server (if available) would work as well.
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