Website builder

[Normandy Cow]

I am very rusty at building websites, it's been a couple of years! I originally built mine using standard wordpress.com but is that still the best product?

I want to help my daughter build a website to showcase all her music, t shirt designs, photography etc.

It has to be something simple (she has taught herself HTML so she is pretty IT savvy, but doesn't want to have to have the bother of building it from scratch, even though she could if she had to).

I bought her domain name on 1and1 and they do have a website builder as part of the package, but I've never used it so wonder if anyone can give me advice on what to use.

Thanks!

[Hells Bells]

NC, I am not with 1and1 now, but their websie builder was quite good when I was. Lots of templates and add-ons. Might be worth a shot, you can always delete is afterwards.

[French Cricket]

NC, it sounds as though Weebly might be perfect for your daughter. It's an online site builder that works on a CMS type basis, from templates that you can just accept as they are or fiddle with the css and html to your heart's content. Their templates are not the most exciting in the world, though there are some new ones due out any minute now and there's another outfit called Weebly Templates who produce some more interesting ones - lots of artists and crafts people have used them. And me.

Weebly is free to use and hosts your site for free too, even with your own domain name pointing to it. If you want to get rid of the 'Create a free site with Weebly' on the bottom you need pay a bit to go 'pro' though (unless you - um - delete it in the css. But I didn't say that).

I've built 3 sites now with Weebly and I'm pretty happy with it. No down time to speak of and good support (email only). Happy to tell you more if you think it might be what you're after!

[Jimbo]

Hi NC.

Moonfruit? Flash based but published with a simultaneous HTML translation to get around search engine blindness with flash (so moonfruit say). Seems to work. 50 GBP buys five sites and I've found the software - as a virtual beginner - easy to understand and use. Originally recommended by another LMH member (MG), I've built five moonfruit sites in three years - all of which I've been happy with. Plenty of attractive templates but relatively straightforward (as I do) to use a blank canvas and customise to your own vision.

My link below is to our moonfruit blog site.

[Normandy Cow]

Thanks for all the tips.

I am reluctant to go with 1&1 as it would restrict me to sticking with them (not that I've had any problems) and also i'm guessing that only 1&1 customers can use it so it probably has a smaller user base.

The other two seem interesting so I will investigate.
FC - is your main rental website built with weebly?

[Martha]

I think Wordpress is still the best, that's what I use. Lots of easy integration with social networks which sounds like it would be important...

[French Cricket]

NC, yes, it is - I've used (and tweaked) a template from Weebly Templates but all the 'build' is Weebly. They have a blog element as well which I haven't used because I have a long standing Blogger blog, though I may start to use it as a 'news' page on the main site. And there are e-commerce widgets too for anyone who's selling anything.

I deliberated for a long time between WP, Jimdo and Weebly, but tbh I didn't feel I had the time to learn WP properly and in the end Jimdo seemed a bit more limited for what I needed.

[Normandy Cow]

Thanks everyone!

It's no longer up to me - I showed her Weebly and she's raced off and done her own thing, at lightning speed (wish I was 14 again!).

She'll kill me if she knew I'd shared it with you, and I'll probably take the link down soon, but in the meantime here is her first draft...

www.katieslack.com

[French Cricket]

Blimey. Chapeau ....

[tavi]

clever girl with a lot of talent! She'll be going places.

P.s. You will make sure she knows all the precautions to take when unknown people contact her, wontcha? Perhaps persuade her not to use a full face portrait of herself?

[kendalcottages]

Great stuff, NC... a number of different talents there!

[wallypott]

Wow.

[lasourcetranquille]

Install a CMS for her - joomla or whatever (I use Dragonfly) - then she can learn all about CMSs, and then eventually PHP and CSS.

Just set my daughter (15) up with one and she now runs www.1dforever.com - and she's only had it a week!

[Ju]

Seriously impressed. You should be very proud.