[kavi]

Hi Guys,

I just started a business and opened shop.

http://www.indusfurniture.co.uk

My website is a mess. I tried to make a simple one using wordpress cos I am tight on cash but I just cant get it to look decent. At this point I am thinking maybe I can just use simple html instead of wordpress templates as I just need something to introduce my business with some text and photos of products, or just hire a programmer to give me a very simple solution.

I just need something simple, like this http://www.tehxeeblondon.co.uk/

Just a photo or slider on page and some text and a heading. And a few pages like Contact, About, Products etc.

[weambulance]

For your needs, you definitely are better off just building a static site than using Wordpress or similar. A static site will be way faster and way more secure, while being a lot easier on the server. User experience matters; shitty, slow sites are not fun to use.

What I recommend you do is build a simple static site, get it looking the way you want, and make sure it's got responsive layout and whatnot so it looks nice on mobile devices (note that the Tehxeeb London site does not have that design feature). Looking nice on mobile is very important these days.

Then, if you want to do stuff like display inventory you can move to a static site generator that ties into a database on your local machine, and just rebuild the site and deploy it live once a week or so, or however often you want. The deployment can be automated. It's not hard to build a static site generator for a specific site if the design is already done, and it's a lot harder to attack a static site than a database dependent content management system like Wordpress.

That all sounds simple, but good design isn't easy. It's hard to get a site to look really good; there are lots of subtle things to worry about that can have significant impact. But having a web presence at all is the most important thing right now, and it's not that hard to make your site look at least professional. So just get things running for now, and when you can afford it invest in having a professional designer spruce things up.

...Just don't let them weigh your site down with a bunch of heavy javascript and CSS bullshit that slows it way down. You want your site to look great and be so snappy users never have to wait for pages to load.

Also, I have no idea about the state of search engine optimization practices (SEO) these days, so I can't comment on that except to say I'm sure there's a right way to do things so your site actually shows up where people will see it in internet searches that don't include your actual business name. Just something else to keep in mind.

[kavi]

Do you think the static site is something I can do myself? Is there a simple method/programme I should look into. I remember I made a little site with HTML back in the good old simple web days..

[weambulance]

I suppose it depends on the real value of your time right now. If your time is cheap, you could sign up for the free trial at teamtreehouse.com and do the first several segments of the Front End Web Development course.

https://teamtreehouse.com/techdegree/fro...evelopment

You'd want to do:

How to make a website
CSS basics
Responsive images
HTML forms (maybe)

With that plus looking shit up online you could pretty easily make the site. They also have short courses (1-4 hours) on all sorts of web design topics. I really like Team Treehouse, it's what got me back into programming a couple years back.

But doing all that will be easily 15-20 hours of work. Maybe more, as tweaking the CSS can be pretty time consuming. So if your time isn't cheap, even though you're strapped for cash you might be better off finding someone to do it for you. A decent web developer could make the site in less time than it would take you to get halfway through the Team Treehouse courses alone.

I don't know of any off the shelf solution that would work well for you, really, at least not without a bunch of tweaking. If you have to do all that tweaking, you might as well just build the site from scratch. It's easier and faster than learning a framework or content management system for a single job.

[kavi]

ok thanks, repped for the advice

[sonoran_]

use fiverr pay like 50$ and get your site to a level you like.

Thats what I did for my site.

However, my mistakes were: the guy didnt speak the best english so communication was a problem. I should have screened that better.
Tell them upfront what the agreement requires and guide them throughout the process.
They will work there ass off for a 5 star review so you can nitpick but dont be an asshole and realize you are paying 50$ so you can be as picky.

[CleanSlate]

If you don't like Wordpress, try Squarespace. It is drag-and-drop easy to use. No coding, no messing around with HTML.

But it costs more, particularly for ecommerce. It's good if you really believe in your business idea and if you don't have the time to mess around with code or hiring a developer.

[Haly08]

If you can spare around a 1000 USD, you can just find some e-commerce developer on upwork.com or freelancer.com. You can get your website build using Spring framework and JSP.

If you want something high end like https://www.overstock.com/ its easy to do it using Hybris.