Hi All,

I've made it one of my goals for this yr to get a decent website up for my business. I live in a rural area and I'm not really expecting it to actually generate leads for me. But it seems that it would be a great place to post up customer referrals, work site pics, and describe the services we offer. I've been doing some resaerch and from what I can tell you spend from less than $10 a month to $50 or more. Options seem to include multiple e-mail accts, various band widths, etc. I'd consider my computer skills to be moderate, what I'm looking for is the short course on what to look for in a program if I choose to buy one & create my own pages and what to look for when choosing a hosting service. Any & all advice is appreciated. Thanks.

 

Frontpage is the best by far.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/fron...o/default.mspx

Dale

 

The best advice is for you to have someone build the web page for you. if you have never built a web page it is a daunting task. Not so much to actually get something running, but to make one that is easy to navigate and pleasing to look at.

Spend a few minutes looking at web sites for your type of work. Do a Google search and then look at some of the web sites that come up. Some are easy to use, others are less than easy.

If you have never built a web site, there are a million things that you don't know, and a million mistakes you will make.

If you do insist on trying to do this yourself, read up on the subject first and expect to spend plenty of time running the site.

 

Not to brag, but this one is pretty well done and the webmaster is a GREAT guy (but he doesn't hire out to do web pages):

www.mastertowing.com

I use Cool Page to do the pages and the hosting costs me (I think) $12 a year. It's a low-maintenance site, so I don't have to spend a lot of time updating (it's actually a little behind right now, got quite a few photos to add to the galleries).

 

Frontpage can do a pretty good job, and it doesn't really take too long to figure out, I designed and maintain my Fire Dept website, it has gone through a few revisions to get where it is now, but I also started from scratch with no Frontpage or web building expirience.

www.NewmarketFire.com

 

Considering the rate at which people today are leaving Internet Explorer and going towards Mozilla Firefox and other browsers, I would stay away from MS Frontpage. Frontpage is good for creating webpages that look nice inside IE, but won't display properly in other browsers. I've also taken over Webmaster duties of sites that were created in Frontpage...I ended up throwing out their pages and starting over it was such a mess.

I personally use Namo Webeditor. It is comparable to Macromedia Dreamweaver (this was the opinion of a co-worker of mine who has EXTENSIVE Dreamweaver experience), but costs ~$75. A Froogle search on Google, or a search on pricewatch.com should help you find the best price for it.


Alternately, I use a webhosting company for our churches web site that has lots of tools to help you create a site. We pay $6.95/month for 1500Mb of space, a domain name, unlimited POP accounts, and other features...Its the BEST deal I've found, and there's no ad banners. PM me if you want more info on it.

 

If it's done properly, other browsers will have no problems with a Frontpage created site, mine is one of those. I test it with Firefox as well as IE.

 

Thanks everyone for your comments, I'm downloading the trial version of Front Page right now, I'll give it a whirl and see how things go, then post back with a progess report in a few wks.