OK, this may get a bit long, but here goes.
I have been asked to create a website for a friends company. He currently has no website, no advertising and until now all his work has been word of mouth. Now he wants to let people all over the world know of what he can do. Perhaps pick up a few clients as a result.

First I need to register a domain name for him, but I think we could need upto 4 domains, ie his company name with co.uk and with .com but also he wants his actual name in the web title, so perhaps another 2 domains again .co.uk and .com

So can anyone recomend a company to register domains with? I have already been recomended to use 123-reg.co.uk

I have heard (on this forum) that its best for me (or rather my friend) to OWN the domain names, so how can I tell if I have outright ownership or if I am just 'leasing' it?

I will also need to have the website hosted, so again any recomendations? Should I go with 123-reg for both services? Or one company for domain and one for hosting?

Biggest unknown I have at the minute is that I have not yet created the site so I don't know how many pages I need, I don't know how big the site will be. So should I create one locally on my PC first to get an idea of size?

For creating the website I was going to use the free software NVU as I have used it (somewhat briefly) in the past. If I need to use something else it needs to be open-source to run on my Ubuntu PC.
The website is going to be fairly basic, nice simple layout, a page on the person, his background, his company, details of past work and some contact details. The most important pages will be the photos of previous work, perhaps 50 to 100 photos in 10 or so sub catagories. Any suggestions as to whether NVU will be OK with this?

There will be no fancy bells and whistles, no online shop, ordering, apps or other BS. Just a nice, simple, clean web presence. There will be no e-mail addresses needed as this person is not on-line. Only fancy thing may be that there are a couple of magazine articles that we may want on there, so perhaps a couple of PDFs hosted as links.

I know the obvious answer to the above would be for this person to go to a web company that does it all and pay them to set it up, or even for us to use templates. But for reasons that I won't go into, this can't happen. I have been entrusted to do this all for him, which I am honered to do, and I want to make it look and work as well as possible for him. So any comments on where to go for the above services?

And will creating and hosting his site automatically get him appearing in search engines? Or do I need to do something so that Google etc pick up his site details so that when someone searches for his name or what he does that this new website appears on the search results? And fairly near the top?

Finally he has asked for a price. I can obviously get accurate prices to him for Domains and Hosting but he has offered to pay me for my work. So what is considered a reasonable fee? He is a friend of my family so I don't want to charge to much. But I also don't have a clue how much I should ask for a 'token' payment. I am not doing it for the money. I would have done it for nothing (don't tell him though ) but he is insisting its done as a paid job. I suppose then he can put it through his books?

Sorry if this is all a bit 'how long is a piece of string' but any help or advice is appreciated.

Thanks,
Steve.

PS, when I have a first draft sorted I will be asking for feedback. It is car related, but most definitly not LOW cost. But I can't say exactly who or what it is just yet.

A couple of years ago, and after a bit of reseaarching, I went with Tsohost.co.uk as my host, they also registered my domains. At the time (not sure if it's still the same) it was a small company and run by a geeky type who actually cared about the business, was very helpful if contacted with noobish questions etc, I had no complaints at all.
I'm pretty sure it only cost about £35 for a whole year too
As for getting near the top of google (bearing in mind that I don;t know much!), I'd say it'll either cost a lot or have to be very unique so as the keywords don't have much other choice than to pick your site out. Still, things have no doubt changed a lot in the past 2+ years!
Oh.. without paying etc. my site took a month or so for the google spiders to crawl through my site and include it in the google search.

I used dreamweaver at the time and it only took a couple of days tinkering to get a few decent looking pages up, if I did it now I'd probably buy a template from templatemonster(?) or similar, they really do look better than anything I can make and were £60 ish, would give a good starting point and save all the messing about with design problems.


^^All the above is probably bad advice from someone who know nowt though

I used Hostpapa to set up our work website.
They do all the registration automatically and their website creation system includes tools to submit to search engines like google.
I also used NVU with a bit of HTML manual editing to tidy things up a bit (though it wasn't totally necessary). Though their domain management software also has simple website creation tools.
I also like hostpapa because they're cheap, I just re-ordered for the next 3 years and including domain registration it came to about £100

Thanks for the suggestions so far.
Just had a look at the template monster. I think I should back track a bit. I am now not totally against using a template, its just I looked at a couple of templates on 123-reg and they were a bit, well, crap. If there are indeed better ones out there to start from then its something I should at least consider.

[Edited on 10/2/11 by balidey]

Get hosting with VIdahost....

Install Joomla... there are THOUSANDS of customisable templates and loads of pluggins etc.... its a bit of a fiddle to get your head around it, but once you figure it out its quite good.

I built this one on Joomla hosted with Vidahost..

If you need any help, drop me a U2ULeskupu

[Edited on 10/2/11 by tegwin]

heres what to do

use 123 reg they are very good and reasonably priced.

1. buy any domain you want. your buying them here and not someone else (you dont technically own it but you have the lease for 2 years and get first refusal on it if that makes sense.

2. find somewhere to host your site that supports joomla.

3. change your DNS records on 123-reg for your WWW, @ and FTP to the new IP address of web host.

4. dowload joomla and upload via FTP to your web host (you can now use ftp.yourdomain.com if you followed the instructions above)

5. search online for a joomla 1.5 template that you like (look to pay around $60, though some are free but usually poor).

6. change all the images/logos of the template to your own logos/images

7. upload template via FTP

8. select template in the admin panel of joomla

9. add some articles and menus

10. register with google places, google analytics etc...

11. profit!


ive known of 'IT consultants' charge £3k+ to do the above, it can be done in an afternoon when you know what your doing.

if your stuck drop me a u2u I might be able to help you out with all of it.

[Edited on 10/2/11 by MikeFellows]

I use UKreg which is part of fasthosts.
I use a friends server to host which he does as a favour as I dont use much. The previous host I used shut down but had been quite good. I think I was paying about £20-30 a year. That included more than enough space to host a load of webpages and hundreds of images (for forum/project hosts).
The domain registration also included email forwarding meaning I could have a number of emails with the domain name in them. This looked nice and professional.
I kept my sites very simple, just 1 page with in fo and contact details. Ive never actively promoted them, and ive never paid for more than the domain or the hosting. I used things like google places which puts you on the map and when people search for your type of service it link to your location as well as your webpage.

with regards to making a site and the size. you want a content managed system.

you dont want to be making tables and dropping images in and calculating widths etc...

this is what joomla is, its an open source content management system.

it superb if im honest. it could happily run a 1 page site or a 10,000 page site.

forget about site size you probably wont need more than 500MB at the very most.

I will reply to the whole post when got bit more time but above advice is pretty much what I would say.

As for domain name and webhosting, I HIGHLY recommend Orchard Hosting. I have used this company for the past 10 years and their prices are reasonable and very good service. I always recommend them to anyone who asks on here (though company is NTDWM).

thanks to all for all the suggestions.
Mike, Joomla looks very interesting, will look at having a play with that later.
Orchard Hosting name has come up a few times, so will look at that option too.
Thanks again.
Will hopefully get something knocked up to get some feedback on at the weekend

i always use getdotted.com , they have free hosting if you buy through them

just be aware of anywhere that doesnt add you as the domain registrant.

I've seen cases where people have had someone register it on their behalf then later try and charge a ridiculous amount for hosting, when they decide to go somewhere else it comes out they own the domain and want £500 for it knowing they have no choice most people pay and move on (the time any sort of court process takes most online businesses would be dead)

of course if your paying for domain name privacy then its a little harder to tell, but the only reason to do that in my opinion is because your probably doing something you shouldn't (morally or legally), admittedly not always.

just beware of some web companies and there practices of tying people in. most people are not educated on the processes and can easily fall foul.

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeFellows
heres what to do

use 123 reg they are very good and reasonably priced.

1. buy any domain you want. your buying them here and not someone else (you dont technically own it but you have the lease for 2 years and get first refusal on it if that makes sense.

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I've built loads of Joomla sites over the years - a good recommendation. from others and me.

However as a current and long customer of Fasthosts...I'd not recommend them at all. Costly and although good to configure if you're a basic user but if you want to customise the site and scripts etc...Forget it! Slow and inexperienced CS and more than often...."No you can't do that on your package..." I have at least seven sites with them and I would have hoped a good customer!

Joomla is superb though and well worth setting up. If you do that though - Don't do it through Fasthosts.

quote:

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Originally posted by mads
I will reply to the whole post when got bit more time but above advice is pretty much what I would say.

As for domain name and webhosting, I HIGHLY recommend Orchard Hosting. I have used this company for the past 10 years and their prices are reasonable and very good service. I always recommend them to anyone who asks on here (though company is NTDWM).

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thanks for the correction Joel. yes, it should be www.orchardhosting.com

I second Orchard Hosting.

And WYSIWYG to create a site (free trial available)