Any of you IT types out there have a recommendation for free web design software? Little project to prove a point to my boss, the site needs to have max. 5 pages and no flash stuff.
It needs to be simple enough for a non-techie to use. I have registered a domain and a hotmail address?
And; if I'm advertising a local service that depends on my presence/skill, do I really need a facebook or twitter presence?
I'm not expecting a reply from Zero; he's probably stuck in the snow. Or is he ?
:-)
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He's not and one of the best of the smaller suites has always been Netobjects Fusion. They do a freebie called "esentials"
netobjects.com/html/essentials.html
Last edited by: Zero on Fri 16 Dec 11 at 16:59
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another vote for NOF Essentials - I'm no designer but I used it to create
www.mikes-walks.co.uk/
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>> another vote for NOF Essentials - I'm no designer but I used it to create
>>
>> www.mikes-walks.co.uk/
>>
More like another non vote for NOF Essentials - basically your site breaks on larger sized screens :( Also images are not optimised properly and are all bitmapped. Not a good advert - would NOT recommend this product for a professional business as it can only damage a business brand. I don't mean to be harsh on your site, I'm sure it's just a personal site and not for a business but it wouldn't be at all suitable for a business.
Basically trying to design a site for a business when you're not a designer is pointless. You can only damage their brand.
Find a solution such as wordpress where you can use a templated design which you can put the businesses branding on and their content into so they have a professional web presence on a budget.
Alternatively of course you can use iPages which is cheap and professional and you'll get a custom professionally designed site.
Just a thought but would you let someone who isn't a doctor prescribe you medicine or operate on you?
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>> And; if I'm advertising a local service that depends on my presence/skill, do I really
>> need a facebook or twitter presence?
Twitter not required, but yeah a facebook page cost nothing and is great for spreading your name and your skills around.
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Thanks both for the lightning replies. Your plan to keep me off car4play by submerging me in a user manual with 579 pages is about to start working heh heh.
Ta.
And bye bye for a while.
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Serif do a free product, its WYSIWYG and is pretty powerful.
www.serif.com/freedownloads/
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IIRC there is a manual and a tutorial, and the tutorial is the more helpful, but at the simplest level it is a case of selecting a style (but don't get hung up on it, you can change it later) and creating some pages - drop us a line if you want a hand
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Notepad :) Or at least PSPad.
Nothing like knowing XHMTL and CSS as you get complete and 100% control.
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Thanks all for your input.
Netobjects haven't sent me a registration yet.
Webplus from Serif has given me a toolbar but won't load.
I have tried a few others but haven't found anything that matches my limited understanding.
It's been a frustrating and tiresome weekend and I've put the project on hold.
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Hi there,
If someone wants to spend nothing and have a web presence then personally I'd point them towards a wordpress site.
I have not yet seen a website designed by a non web designer which is anywhere near professional looking and normally they're worse than that. I wouldn't even go there.
Find a free wordpress theme which fits the needs of your client and personalise it with their branding and then just upload their content into it through the wordpress admin. This makes it easy also for them to make changes and also from SEO terms, it's easy to run a blog on the site and keep the content regularly updating which will help them get up google rankings.
Twitter and Facebook are both good in different ways. In terms of SEO, twitter is great because you get multiple strong inlinks into your site if people retweet your tweets if they're linking say to a blog post within your site. Also if you put a feed in then you get regular updating content which helps the search engines index your site more frequently which pushes you up the google rankings. Facebook is good for the same inlinks reasons but not so good from an updating site content point of view since not many people put a 'facebook feed' into their site.
Wordpress will make putting a twitter feed in simple with their twitter widget - you just need to find a wordpress theme which supports it. Installing wordpress is fairly simple depending on which hosting company you use. Some make it a simple click of a button and with others you'll need to install the simplescripts etc yourself but you can also call the hosting company and they will help you do this - once wordpress is installed, you simply upload your zipped free theme and your ready to go to put in all your clients content into the site without touching any code.
Of course if you want to host it with us and we'll design it all, you get paid the client introduction fee of the first two months equivalent hosting. The costs are here: We specialise in small to medium sized businesses and can help them with SEO and all related issues. You also know the site is backed up in triplicate and on our servers same as car4play.
I was hunting for some free themes to give you links to but found these premium ones - most aren't expensive but are all really well designed themes
Here's some links to some free wordpress themes I went for the free woo themes as the company are known for producing good stable themes.
Hope this helps - any other questions and just fire them back at me. If I know more about the company, I could possibly point you to something more specialised. I know of a few companies who are particularly good say for portfolio sites and will host them for free too.
Last edited by: VxFan on Fri 23 Dec 11 at 12:43
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You could if you wanted to try to design a site with iPages yourself - it's free to use and works in the browser. I design with it. Here are links to sites built with iPages
To get the best out of it, you need to know html and css but if you're not a designer, I wouldn't go there - we have some sites built with it by non designers - here is an example
Last edited by: VxFan on Fri 23 Dec 11 at 12:46
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The links from the first message are: The free woo themes: www.woothemes.com/themes/free/
The premium themes but nicely designed and which are pretty corporate: bit.ly/s8DEUo
iPages hosting costs: bit.ly/vsSbm1
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Sorted the links out for you.
Some of the HTML codes are in the swear filter to prevent mis-use by certain individuals.
Href is one of the codes.
Also added target="_blank"> to your links so that they open in another browser page ratherthan taking people away from this site.
Vx.
Last edited by: VxFan on Fri 23 Dec 11 at 12:50
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Thanks for sorting the links.
Maybe one of the features for our new Car4Play is to add in the ability to put in links with a click of a button and a dialogue screen can come up to put the h*** in much the same as you do in a mail program. The opening up in a new page would be handled automatically.
I'm normally very good when I'm building sites putting in all external links to open in new pages but I was being naughty and not using it on my forum post. Bad Emma :D
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Free web design software - Zero
