Anyone used these before? http://website.1and1.com/how-to-build-a-website I'm helping a friend set up a new business and we thought this would be the simplest bit. Turns out we were wrong Any advice?
I built a site for my mom last week on yola.com. It was pretty easy if you have any kind of computer experience. Hosting costs are low and they have several options. I can't say anything about other sites but this one was cool. I would recommend it.
Plus you can build it for free and preview it. I made this in about an hour and a half. http://misterrobertsfurnituretexas.yolasite.com/ (Shameless plug for my mom's awesome furniture store in Conroe on 105 by the dam, check it out!). It isn't finished or polished yet but it works. The IT guy they using charged them $200 a month for "maintenance" for pretty much the same website and they didn't know any better. They are going to switch to this as soon as they clear it up with their current hosting site.
Be nice. It's a decent site for a small business. Baumer- take a look at basic site building for the 'standard' structure of a business site, including header and footer links. I would put the phone number, email and address on the top of every page, at least. You probably want to see if that builder allows for 'responsive' site building. That's where the site scales for mobile screens. This is extremely important these days where more and more people do the majority of their web browsing on their mobile devices. $200/month is pretty high for something like this but you really don't want to get sucked into being the tech support if your mom wants to grow it into something more (heh, heh).
If you're going through the effort of building a website on your own and have it hosted, you might as well use a nice wordpress theme. There is an upfront cost but it's very, very small, $50-$60 on the higher end. Go to http://themeforest.net and see what could work for you. So many small businesses skimp on the website but it's a huge avenue for a lot of new business. If your website isn't up to snuff, people tend to just move on to the next one. http://demo.theme-fusion.com/ is the highest selling wordpress theme there and it sells for $55. The return can be so high on such little investment.
I built this in an hour for her when I was bored the other. First time I have ever even tried to build any website, I was just messing around with the site builder, I wasn't really worried about structure or making it perfect. Just trying to help out the OP.
