How much is it normally for a basic website? By basic I mean homepage, contact page, info page, and about us page, logo, basic advertising stuff. Any ideas? and who would you recommend? Would wikipedia be worth it?
Hosting one isn't much, annual fee that's often included in your web hosting package. You might already be paying for one?
Mine is about $80 a year including the domain renewal. That's a domain from GoDaddy and hosting from Site5. Site5's customer support is awesome by the way. If you want a WYSIWYG editor + hosting + domain name squarespace is pretty good and they give students a discount for the first year.
Hosting is cheap. Having the actual website and logo designed depends on how basic. Something simple but with a nice design one can be $800-$1200 for 1-15 pages. That's what I was looking at to have mine built (non-MA related) by a UK based company. Obviously cost depends on the contractor so you may be able to to find designers with significantly lower or higher price ranges.
For under half that sort of price I'd happily build a custom page for someone's school, and I'm happily working full time in another industry! Those prices seem way too high for a simple website unless they're also incorporating a full on branding and design session with logos, photos, etc, plus all copy written for the school. I can't see how it would be value for money otherwise.
Yeah I thought it was pretty expensive myself so I didn't even email them. They cater to a niche clientele though any website designer could handle the job. They do nice work though... http://websitesfortranslators.co.uk/webdesign/portfolio/
Wikipedia isn't worth trying to advertise on. They're only interested in famous or noteworthy organisations, so individual schools or instructors are very unlikely to be allowed to have an article. On top of that, you have no control over your content on Wikipedia, as anyone can change the article. As such, if anyone has anything negative to say about you and it is well documented, you will see that on Wikipedia eventually. For a website you need the following: Hosting - this includes web space (where the site sits) and bandwidth (the web traffic which allows you to show people your site) Domain name - e.g. www.yourclubname.com, which points to your website and allows people to see your site without having to type in an IP address Content - what you actually want to show people. Text and pictures usually, but this also includes things like your overall style Hosting and domain names are cheap. The main issue is translating the content into markup language and scripting to actually make your site work. This can be very straightforward if you only want a holding page with some contact details, but gets more complex if you want things like a login area or a student database. As complexity increases, the likelihood is that you might consider a Content Management System to assist with looking after your pages - I've personally never used one because I take an immediate dislike to them as soon as I try to do anything I can easily managed in HTML/CSS/PHP, but others swear by them. If you can't do this yourself, you might need some help, but basic HTML is very easy to learn, especially if the financial incentive is over a thousand dollars saved!
As a complete beginner to websites, I found this ebook and it really is a step by step guild to designing a simple website yourself. Not as complicated as I thought. I'm in the middle of putting together a blog now. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Build-Website-With-WordPress-Edition/dp/1480194298
If you are going to design your own webpage using HTML then yes it is fairly easy, but you'll need a lot of patience! One potential problem that I encountered when I tried to create a website from scratch was that what looked good using one web browser looked terrible in another one. I can't remember the exact details, but I think the frames didn't align in the same way in Firefox as they did in WE.
Wordpress.org It's free, you get pretty much your choice of sub-domain name (it'll always have wordpress.org as the domain) and it's easy as pie to edit pages. You're limited to an extent in what elements you can edit, but if you're just looking for a simple hosted website to give out information, you won't need much more than Wordpress.org (I'm specifying .org as googling may give you Wordpress.com which is the content management system software itself, which is ace, but probably more techy than you need).
My website is 100% free. I use: Host: http://5gbfree.com/ Domain: www.dot.tk I produce my web content using MS Frontpage, but even MS Word could be used to produce a basic site.
I purchased an easy to use product called Artisteer (about £70 if you want to buy it and remove their advertising from the finished website). Purchasing a domain costs about £5 a month, and a free ftp prog. will upload the files that Artisteer creates. Artisteer is very much a drag and drop program - a bit like creating a PowerPoint. My website has done very well for me.
I run a freelance tutoring business focusing on early childhood education and primary school tutoring. The demand has grown quite a bit over the last two years so I'm currently creating my own website on here. Atm I'm using the 30 day free website trial, which offers a simple drag and drop system. Since my web dev experience is very basic I'm finding the drag and drop system very useful. I also started learning a bit of basic web dev on Codeacademy a few weeks back but unfortunately didn't have time to keep at it.
Wix or Redspace are under $100 a year, they are relatively easy to use and include the domain. In terms of advertising on other websites, having social media pages that link to your website (like Facebook) will help people find your website. That said, SEO is a whole different area and takes a lot of work to get you high up on search engines.
