WYSIWYG Web Building and hosting sites

[Vigilias]

Afternoon mortals!

I run my own small business and think it's about time it had a web presence.

However, I am no web site builder by any streatch of the imagination so I'll need something of the WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) nature. Something that can handle jpeg and gif as well as the usual text.

I saw an add on TV a while back for such a site but it's only ever been on once and I didn't have enough time to note the site name.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

[Jay]

Adobe Dreamweaver is a WYSIWYG website builder but it still requires basic programming in HTML/CSS.

What type of business are you running? There are a lot of people who use blog to promote their products. Two popular blogs are Blogger (Blogspot) and Wordpress.

Sorry I can't help much. But I do wish you the best of luck.

[princealbertofb]

First, let me congratulate you on having your own business. Its truly a dream come true. I did a search and came up with this site called Innerplanet. Its based in Washington state. Here's their URL: http://innerplanet.com/ It looks like it has everything a small business owner would want from a web hosting site. I don't know what your budget is, but it looks like they take major credit cards. Good luck to you! mile:

That looks like a useful link, Xandor, thanks for posting it.

[Vigilias]

Thanks for the links everyone.

I call myself an Heraldic Genealogist. I research family coats of arms from official publications, interpret the odd technical language of heraldry (Blazonry) to enable me to demonstrate to my client how his coat or arms looks. Very often all you get is a technical description of a coat of arms rather than a picture and even then it's only in black and white.

The information I find can then be painted on to pretty much anything although I prefer to use a nice piece of wood. It isn't something that can be knocked out in a day. Something the size of an A4 piece of paper can take a week and some of the stuff I've been asked to paint has been tortuous! Especially when I have to represent fret-work.

I also paint civic and Royal Heraldry. I recently sold a large representation of the marital arms of Prince William and Kate Middleton to a local pub. On marriage Her Majesty created Price William the Duke of Cambridge - the pub had the same name.

I work in acrylic, it's my preferred medium as they can be diluted with water and dry almost immediately meaning I can paint straight on top of one colour with another, something you can't do with oils.

The nature of my product means that it can be difficult to carry an example around with me all the time just in case someone might be interested. It would be useful to point the client to a website.

[pellaz]

dont know what the functionality of your small business web page would be? in some cases you are thinking to splash up a front page pic of a store front whatever, show contact information (business name, phone, email, maybe physical street address and or a map). you might want to show what your products are.
-are you thinking to do some internet sales off the web page, first you might want to sell on a ebay store front first.

get a domain name:
i used networksolutions.com //did this a while back so things may have changed but network solutions had the advantage in that they had a private registration where your name is not listed directly in the "whois" listing. anyways not the lowest price so shop around. there are lots of top level domains but .com and .co.uk are generic, maybe your name is already taken so .biz would be better. you should be aware of this process even if you plan to give the web design to a third party.
-pick a name exactly descriptive of what you do
-your name choice is easy to type and remember
-you rent/ subscribe to the name and must pay a fee ever 1-3years, dont miss the payment.

email and dynamic dns
i used zoneedit.com (its free) to sort things out; connected networksolutions to zoneedit to get email and resolve a none static ip address (dynamic dns). also zoneedit will point to your final ip address and in my case i pay my internet provider for a static ip address, not a dynamic one.

likely more information that you want, whatever.
finally i recently used iWeb a apple program well because i have a mac.
-there may be a rev4.0 version of iWeb out soon. the 3.04 version i had was a little unstable but got the job done
-apple web hosting on MobileMe is going away soon and that was the main focus of iWeb but you can use it to design web pages and publish them onto your local hard drive (access them in your browzer as file://mycompany.co.uk or double in the index.html file.
-ftp the final design to your internet host from your hard drive.
-iWeb uses templates. pick a template and that is what your site is going to look like, not much is allowed for adjusting the template and you cant pick choose parts between templates easily.
-its fast tho; gets something nice looking up in a few hours.

there are many disadvantages to hosing your own web site. and even more disadvantages in to doing your own email server. zoneedit type sites are free and take your email for example [email protected] and translate it to [email protected] with out the user knowing. email sites like google and yahoo have got the email process down and are free and very stable.

if you get a 3rd party to design your site
-have them design a site you can edit yourself. say you plan a special christmas 3 day sale?
-you have control of your domain name
-the email re direct via a zoneedit site is easy