Best way to start up a website these days???

[LooksGood]

I didn't want to stat another thread, so I wanted to give it a try in here:
Does anyone know of a good web design firm? I love what I see with the WordPress capabilities, but I would like to find a firm who can use it and truly implement good SEO. I don't mind spending up to $8-9k on a good site, I just want something that looks good (i.e. large text is not the title banner) and has damn good SEO.
If anyone can point out a good company or even a good webforum with some codejunkies, I'd appreciate it.

PM me details of what you need, maybe I can build it for you.

 

[Friedmett]

Setting up a website is cheap and easy to do but the problems is regular high quality content and getting your awareness done on social media and everywhere else.

Elance and fiverr can do it for you outsourced.

The main point is to have a burning desire to share and build as traffic to the website is work on a daily matter and otherwise nothing gives nothing.

 

[Jeremiah Say]

Get a self-hosted website and leverage on the Wordpress CMS. They have lots of useful plugins. I'd say invest in a good theme (average about $50 per theme). When you're first starting out, you wouldn't need a good hosting. Just a shared hosting by some popular hosting companies (do a Google search - bluehost, a small orange etc.) should work just fine during your initial stage.

I walk-the-talk so an example of a self-hosted wordpress website can be seen on my profile or if you are lazy, just here: https://boutique.humbleandrich.com/ (MOD please remove this hyperlink if necessary - I don't mean to break any rules).

The theme I am using is the ROYAL by themeforest: https://themeforest.net/item/royal-multipurpose-wordpress-theme/8611976 and the site is currently hosted under WebSynthesis which cost roughly US$100/month for a dedicated hosting.

Let me know when your site is up! Would definitely love to show my support and leave a comment or 2

 

[am55]

The thing is, pretty much any CMS out there will take you as long to learn as the basics, and dealing with contractors can just suck weeks of your time in aggregate, so for a simple, mostly text based static page, why not just learn the basics? As a bonus, your page will be lightning fast.

1. learn HTML and CSS basics. There are thousands of pages with the 101, I used HTML Dog back in the days. HTML is "the pieces of document" and CSS is "how to show them".
2. learn flex-box. This lets you place things relative to each other to create your menus, your responsive layout, etc. without downloading a ton of libraries that will one day break when someone is bored of updating them.
3. learn the basics of UNIX/Linux, probably Ubuntu since it's the most popular. Basically how to create and edit things from the command line, how to install software, etc. Additionally, learn rsync, with which you will update your site.
4. learn the basics of nginx, a popular and easy to use server.
5. rent a super cheap Ubuntu instance on somewhere like OVH (for North America). Install nginx. Optional: you could probably get away with the AWS free tier given how small and low traffic the page will be, but that's a bit more work to learn, and the virtualisation layer can introduce unsightly lag.
6. edit your site locally and rsync that folder to the folder you're serving with nginx on the Ubuntu instance.
Optional:
7. use the userid module in nginx to identify visitors; ingest the logs every morning with a cron job into a Postgres DB; build simple analytics. This may take a bit longer to figure out, but is more accurate than Google Analytics, doesn't send your visitors' data to Google, and will take less time than figuring out how to install GA and debug it and watch how Google likes to break tons of little things all the time with invisible, deaf support.

Voila, static, responsive, fast site for $5/month and probably a couple days of tutorials.

 

[F.G]

squarespace ftw! pretty solid templates and gets the job done pretty easily.
should check them out might have some promo codes lying around the web here

 

[Jarmush]

A wordpress template is a nice option

 

[otc]

Learn HTML

Buy components and build a rack mount server. Lease rackspace at a hosting provider.

Set up Apache

Register a domain

Easy.