New website - hosting

My wife wants to have a basic website for her Interior Design business. I checked web hosting reviews and came up with this:

http://www.ipage.com/ipage/index.bml

Is something like that the best way to go? I've never built a website. I'd like to learn how to build a basic one and get it online. Any other suggestions?

wordpress + godaddy = can't go wrong!

Check out Squarespace. People are loving it, a much better solution for someone looking to deploy a site rather than learn web hosting and administration.

http://www.squarespace.com/

I just started my own busines - I used to sell the service where I had designers, SEO, copywriters do it all, and now I do it all myself.

I've done the wordpress, blog, godaddy website tonight route etc, and I will probably end up using adobe dreamweaver at some point.

But for now, the best thing I've found is Serif Webplus X2 and X4. If you can use powerpoint, you can make super nice sites.

here are my just two examples that I did.
www.jcollierlaw.com
www.chytenlaw.com

I have hosting at godaddy and simply upload my sites via a command in the software (ftp). Working on the site is fast when it is on your computer, then you just upload your changes.

There is also a good user forum for serif.

you can by the software at costco online, it comes with one year of hosting, but I have never used thier hosting.

I manage a website in godaddy and i'm not a big fan of them. Their control systems and account managers seem all over the place and unorganized. You have to click many links just to get to popular important areas.

I also manage one at 1.and1.com , I prefer them way over godaddy.

I use 1&1 as well. It is a little learning curve, but I have called their support several times at weird hours and they always have been able to help me.

Dont use gogaddy for hosting. For domain management they are great but for hosting there are better companies.

Squarespace is a great tool as well as Wordpress. They both have great user interfaces for editing and publishing content. There are two versions of Word Press, wordpress.org and wordpress.com. Wordpress.com is the one you want to use for your situation. They have a ton of support and plenty of "themes" that you can chose from. Either of these two platforms will get you up and running quickly without having to learn code.

For host providers there are a ton, 1and1.com, http://www.zipservers.com/ (shared hosting).

(Message edited by Pierce Bronkite on January 29, 2010)

http://www.bluehost.com

Go to simplescripts in your control panel, install soholaunch OR go to http://wix.com now and starting building. Lastly, Google sites allows for simple pages for $0.

Bobby those look great. how hard was the learning curve?

Thanks! The curve wasn't too bad at all. They have a lot of templates that you can just click and change. I am pretty good with technical stuff, but I saw the site you did for the personal trainer, and I bet you could do really well with this program.

this was my first site with it www.exoticdancerrights.com
and this is the latest (still on a subdomain, not officially launched) http://bailey.law-demo.com


For that first site, I picked a template, deleted what I didn't want, and added a few things. The most recent site was done from scratch, but I stole the color scheme from another site I saw.

The flash on the first site was done using the webplus program, on the second I used drawplus (same company) to create the .swf files. There are very good tutorials online.

I've found the programs from serif to be cheap and good. I just picked up the page layout/publishing program PageplusX4 for 80 bucks with a $40 rebate from Frys.