Sites for building a web site

bobland · 10 Sep 2013

I built a web site for my wife's running club. I used WordPress and her legacy ISP. This was a daunting task, so much so, that after I got their home page up and running I bailed on the project. The reason? It may have been OK for someone who does this all the time but I don't, have a very short attention span and am not running on all cylinders.

Recently, I saw a post on Digg for SquareSpace.com that offers such a service. Got me to thinking. What we need is something that is truly for the intellectually challenged. Something that takes no knowledge of IIS, Apache, PSP, Javascript and the like. However, as SquareSpace is a startup, I'd prefer a company that has longer legs, so to speak.

Our site is not complicated. A few pictures, a bit of text, links for email, the ability to submit an application and the ability to add photos/pages on a regular basis by anyone in the club, or at least, a select few.

Recommendation are greatly appreciated.

MilesAhead · 10 Sep 2013

I'm not a web developer. But when I decided to put my programs up on the web for people to download, I ran into the learning curve you are talking about. In the end I suffered through by looking up a lot of html and JavaScript documentation and asking on forums how to use css and other stuff.

The main trouble is, at least with the free tools I have tried, the wysiwyg editor or wizard approach tends to produce code that can't be maintained without ripping your hair out. Stuff like 50 "&sp"s stuck together to align things. I would guess that the really easy to use and maintain tools cost in excess of $300.

My advice would be to canvas for sites that provide the tools and give a good deal. Preferably with a free trial. If the page is too tough to create, cancel and try another web service provider.

Or test drive one of those $300 page creation suites.

Boozad · 10 Sep 2013

bobland said:

Our site is not complicated. A few pictures, a bit of text, links for email, the ability to submit an application and the ability to add photos/pages on a regular basis by anyone in the club, or at least, a select few.

Would a Ning community website cover all of that? I think the basic package is around $20 per year and it's easy to design and maintain. Here's mine that I still pay for but never bother with any more. I have all of my Batman comic scans hosted on there ready for HTML coding into eBay listings, although originally it was used as an archive so i didn't have to keep pulling my comics out to look at them.

bobland · 12 Sep 2013

I tried SquareSpace. It crashed for 2 hours straight. Once I was able to get it to not crash I couldn't update any of the templates with my own content. After another couple of hours I gave up. Tried Weebly. Got a working web site up in a matter of a few hours. The site is almost live. Only thing I have to do is contact our old host and get them to recognize the new site.

Weebly is pretty good. Not perfect but it did everything we need more or less. We upgraded to the Pro version for the extra tools like passwording pages, search, form builder and a few other things. While it does cost money and a bit at that, it serves our purpose with zero coding or needing to access anything external. On top of that, all user content can be exported via CVS.

SquareSpace is great with images while Weebly is not too good.