WEBSITES

I browse The Australian regularly along with a number of other sites, all of which are tabs on my internet browser.  I noticed this article the other week in their small business section.  It is on the trials and tribulations of setting up and maintaining a web site.

My experience hasn’t been too bad, but I do have a few stories.

WEB CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (CMS)

We set up our websites originally in Drupal, an open source web content management system (CMS), thanks to Graham’s research and experience.  We got a certain mob to do the template, theme or “cascading style sheet (CSS)”.  A few issues there but they didn’t do too badly.  One of the problems we had was that we would spot a problem and they would supposedly fix it but then we found they hadn’t.  We eventually came to the conclusion that they weren’t “testing” the results of their work.  Strange but true!! 

With open source tools, the actual application is free, although you can make donations.  But you might need to pay for someone to set it all up for you and configure the system to make it suitable for what you wish to do.  The quote given the article above of $10,000 for a site seems expensive to me.  I would suggest that to setup a website in Drupal is probably 1-3 days work for a good Drupal developer.  Even at $1,000/day, this is still only $3,000.  But if you wanted a lot of features in that site such as with on-line payments, and perhaps some extended survey capability, etc ... then it might cost you more.  The CSS might also cost a bit, say $3-5K depending on how fancy you want it and whether there are moving bits to it.

Having said all that, Drupal has a whole stack of free themes as well.  You might need to tweek them, or get someone to tweak them, and perhaps they aren't unique to you alone .... but they are a great start.

TESTING THE LOOK OF YOUR WEBSITE

Now testing a template to see how it looks and works in web browser X on operating system Y or web browser D on operating system F is a challenge as there are so many different combinations of browser/operating system, including the various versions of each!  For instance you may have say a web browser of Mozilla Firefox v3.2 on Microsoft Windows XP ....and your site looks great with that combination.  But someone else may view your site using Safari v4.0 on a Macintosh operating system ....and it looks like rubbish.  So I found this site – Browser Shots, which allows you to enter your web address and it will use servers all over the place to test your web site.  And it’s free!!

DOMAIN NAME

Your domain is your web address.  For Australian web sites you can get a “xxxx.com.au” site.  But you can also get any others too such as a .com, .info, .biz and so on.

If you use MelbourneIT, they seem more expensive to me than most, and it is quite annoying.  So search around in Australia if you want a .com.au name.  If you want a .com or say a .biz site, then GoDaddy is reliable and cheap .... faaar cheaper than MelbourneIT.  I haven’t tried to get a .com.au site through them but perhaps you can.

So search around for a good deal if that is useful to you.

WEB HOSTS

You will someone to actually host your web site so it is all connected up to the rest of the web and has various mechanisms to stop spam and other malicious stuff.  Again, search around and look for price competitiveness but also service, particularly if you are maintaining your own site in something like Drupal.

LOGO

You would likely want a logo for your site.  I find these guys, Aussie Logos, very good value, very quick and responsive.

So ....I would back up Ed’s 10 tips in The Australian ... they are valuable. 

Lukim All