What is the easiest way for a non-designer, non-programmer to create a company website? [closed]

Question

My brother owns a small business (2 people) and wants to make a web site for it:

• site should have a professional design (e.g. templates, no design necessary)
• easy to post articles and pictures
• he doesn't want just a blog (wordpress) but something more like a 5-page site that he can add a page to, but one page might be a blog
• he wants his own domain name
• he wants to be able to set it up and manage it himself
• he computer skills are word/excel/browser
• it should be free or inexpensive like $10 a year

What is the best option for him nowadays?

• I used google's "site creator" about a year ago and found it difficult
• wordpress is very easy to set up and use, but can that be turned into a e.g. 5-pay website?
• does anyone have experience with a web hoster which has a very easy way to create a templated site, e.g. for $2 a month with some easy PHP content management solution?
• back in the 90s I used geocities and lycos which were free and actually not that bad for publishing content on simple websites, surely there is something better and easier today which allows you to also have your own domain name
• I've got some domains at godaddy, has anyone used their site creating services and found them useful?

Answer 1

Your best bet is to use any type of Content Management System. There are literally hundreds of different projects out there which aim to make website creation and management an idiot-proof process.

Some of the most well known and regarded include Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke, PHPNuke, and so on.

The idea is to check out as many of the CMS systems as you can and pick one that will work right for you. Each has their own pros and cons, and it is going to end up having to be a personal choice to find the one that most successfully solves you needs.

Oh, and many of these are free, which is the true beauty of it.

If you run your own web hosting, working with any content management system should be pretty straightforward. If you have to rely on commercial web hosting, don't fret. Many of the top Content Management Systems are included as installable packages. So if you like Joomla, Drupal, and others, you can still get them with most popular web hosts.

Answer 2

+1 for WordPress.

• It doesn't have to contain any "blog posts" and can contain a handful of "article" pages instead.
• Many hosting providers feature this as a simple one-click install, so it's extremely easy to set up.
• There are many fine visual styles ("themes") preinstalled in WordPress, and many more available.
• It's also a very well-known platform, so in the case your brother needs help, it's not much hassle for someone else to understand it and make adjustments.

I find that a CMS (content management system) is overkill for such a small site.

• This kind of system is named as if it were the right thing, but in my experience a CMS makes sense if you have 30-500 pages to maintain. A CMS may be too complex for just a few pages.

Answer 3

The easiest way for a non-designer, non-programmer to create a company website? Hire a professional to do it for them. They can always take control when it's "done".

If their area of expertise is not web design and/or development, they're likely to struggle to come up with something really good. There's just so much to think about that a beginner simply won't know.

With that said, a really simple CMS (one that makes Wordpress look complex) like Perch, Chyrp, Textpattern or Graffiti might be a good place to start.

Answer 4

Wordpress can be turned into a 5 page website and is in genral very user friendly.

Answer 5

Joomla

After the initial set up of the site its pretty straight forward to move on with the content. If the business expands you can always get someone to take care of the back end of things and bring Joomla to its full potential :)

Very much supported as well if you run into problems

Answer 6

I'm surprised nobody mentionned Citydesk from the very same Joel who co-founded stackoverflow ;)

http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/