Lay My Hat

Hi. I have a domain name with a website that I did some 16 years ago in dreamweaver for my small business. It does quite well on google. I am retiring the business from August this year and will carry on renting our own two properties but need to update the website and get away from dreamweaver! Does anyone have any tips on who/what to use etc?

Congrats on your retirement.
Why do you need to get away from DW?
Changing the status of the rental is not difficult. There are tax issues.The Spanish laws are not on the side of a landlord

I find DW hard to work with and it dosent look very up to date or friendly on the eye. I don't have to change the status of the rentals

we built our website on wix.com and find it easy to use. Before that we used godaddy but ran into issues and lost our work.
Both are great with quickly doing a great website and with plugins for calendars and payments.

The issues with these companies are that you don't "own" your website coding. So you will be stuck with six or godaddy and in case you move on will lose your work. For self hosting sites most commonly seems to be WordPress. But WP seems to be pretty hard work for just creating a single website.

Sorry Roxytoo I did see your reply.
DW, is really up-to-date with the latest web technology That is if you have the latest version.
It can be downloaded as a trial and if used intensively over the trial period you can have a website up and running.
I don't know what level of competence you have with HTML.
Free website building software. None of these are perfect, but will give you a good looking website which can be played if you look at the code. For that use Sublime text with some Packets added to help you do code write tasks.
Incomedia WebSite X5 Or improved for a small fee.
CoffeeCup Free Not all features available for free.
Mobirise, a lot of code "blocks" are not free. My personal recommendation for drag and drop.
Recently came upon Openelement. Which I like the look of but have not played with yet.
What sort of services can your website host use? If it can then
website could be made with WordPress. Plug and play (sort of)

Are you looking to change web host?
The following maybe of interest.
Wix- Weebly- Webnode-
With some hosts you may find free means limited bandwidth, limited amount of pages or adverts placed on your website.

Thanks all, I want to keep the domain name I have had for years as there is a lot of seo attached to it and google seems to like it plus keep the same hosting company. I looked at word press but that didnt look that easy either!! Dreamweaver is an older version so may look at updating that....

If you have used Dreamweaver then I guess that you are happy working in HTML. I switched to Wordpress several years ago. You can use it without any coding knowledge but having some enables you to maximise its potential. As a start you can copy and paste the code from your old website. Best of luck.

DW is expensive to purchase with monthly fees.*
The latest versions do have basic Bootstrap integration.
Get a basic layout done quickly with a trail.
If you not 100% up-to-date with Bootstrap HTML read the following
https://www.w3schools.com/bootstrap4/default.asp
https://www.quackit.com/bootstrap/boots ... tstrap.cfm
https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/getti ... roduction/
The above also has snippets which you can cut and paste into DW
https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/examples/
some more snippets.
https://bootsnipp.com/

*There are obviously illegal ways of changing this

I switched from an old version of DW to WordPress a few years ago too & it wasn't too painful. The key is using a good quality theme as the basis for your site. I use Divi - it has lots of customisation options, especially if you understand HTML & CSS, although that's not essential. WordPress & Divi are widely used so there are a lot of resources & support out there. You can keep your existing domain name although you might want to switch to a host that supports WordPress.