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Any free website design tools out there?
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| Richard Butler |
I didn't want to post this elsewhere on TA as I prefer talking to people I have gotton to know here.
I want to do a basic website design to then hand over to my Brother who will make it look more pro and amalgamate it into my existing site.
Each time I try a supposedly free design service I am hit with costs halve way through the process. I don't want any costs, just some simple free tool I can fuk about with and then send over the finished result to my Brother. This is a right pain because you commit time to going through the design only for the inevitable cost capture point to be met at which point I withdraw.
Any suggestions welcomed. |
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| Storyteller |
Wordpress. So many free & legal templates to use.
As a webdeveloper I hate its guts, but unless you have very specific needs a simple quick&dirty website based on Wordpress is just lovely and almost always the right choice. |
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| atxbigballer1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Storyteller
Wordpress. So many free & legal templates to use.
As a webdeveloper I hate its guts, but unless you have very specific needs a simple quick&dirty website based on Wordpress is just lovely and almost always the right choice. |
I made some websites in my day WordPress, css and html is what I used.
That was 4 years ago.
What is every one using in 2015? |
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| atxbigballer1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Richard Butler
I didn't want to post this elsewhere on TA as I prefer talking to people I have gotton to know here.
I want to do a basic website design to then hand over to my Brother who will make it look more pro and amalgamate it into my existing site.
Each time I try a supposedly free design service I am hit with costs halve way through the process. I don't want any costs, just some simple free tool I can fuk about with and then send over the finished result to my Brother. This is a right pain because you commit time to going through the design only for the inevitable cost capture point to be met at which point I withdraw.
Any suggestions welcomed. |
What kind of website do u want to make? |
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| DJ RANN |
| quote: | Originally posted by Storyteller
Wordpress. So many free & legal templates to use.
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This. It's really not difficult to learn and the forums are really helpful. One thing that you should really do it design the site in photoshop first. Each button or DIV being a different layer then export the folder with discrete images and arrange it all in wordpress and using it as the backend.
The thing you really need to understand though is your customer; are they using a tablet, phone or a desktop primarily? - then cater to that. My business caters mainly to a slightly older demographic and when people find us it's primarily via a desktop, so our site is built to be a rich experience on that platform. We're also a "luxury"/high end business as such so I don;t really want to cater to a dumbed down phone version. So we run two versions, a simple on for mobile which gives basic info and a full rich very polished version for desktop.
This currently sucks are google recently changed their master search algorithm to favor mobile content so i'll have to make a sexy mobile platform as the primary.
You really can't build a rich content site that caters perfectly to phones, tablets and desktops simultaneously. You basically need two different sites.
| quote: | Originally posted by Storyteller
As a webdeveloper I hate its guts, but unless you have very specific needs a simple quick&dirty website based on Wordpress is just lovely and almost always the right choice. |
Why do you hate it? I'm not an ardent fan as such but it does seem like an elegant and pretty decent working solution to simplify standards. It's great not having to build things like shopping carts and contact forms from the ground up. |
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| Storyteller |
| quote: | Originally posted by DJ RANN
Why do you hate it? I'm not an ardent fan as such but it does seem like an elegant and pretty decent working solution to simplify standards. It's great not having to build things like shopping carts and contact forms from the ground up. |
From the user perspective this is true. The user experience is good, easy to use in many contexts.
From the developer perspective not so much. The following are only applicable for developers and usually only pop their ugly heads around when in need of something custom.
1. Wordpress is hard to test. It is hard to implement an automated way of discovering broken code while more modern frameworks do this very well.
2. Unusual plugin programming patterns. Again it is easy to break things, hard to test them, and Wordpress strays away from the usual approach for plugin implementation.
3. Poor quality of plugins. There is a great community that has solved most of the problems you can bump into as a website owner. Plugins are usually not extensible and as such hard to modify to solve wishes that differ (only by a little) from the norm. It's not uncommon for plugins to contain unsafe procedures where they introduce simple ways to hack your website.
4. Dependency management. Sometimes plugins are depending on other plugins. One plugin updates, the other doesn't, things break out of the blue. Usually because the plugins are written poorly. Other frameworks solve this issue for you and only update to plugin versions that are known to work together properly maintaining a working application (website) at all times.
Probably a few I forgot here but these where the most important ones when I built the new website for my former employer. https://www.djbroadcast.net :)
| quote: | Originally posted by atxbigballer1
I made some websites in my day WordPress, css and html is what I used.
That was 4 years ago.
What is every one using in 2015? |
Wordpress :p |
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| SystematicX1 |
Richard,
There's actually a lot of questions that come to mind when you ask this.
However, I assuming this is music related? What exactly do you mean your going to hand it over to your brother. Is he just adding the bells and whistles and your handling the aesthetics end?
After doing many musical web sites I now know that it is such an open ended question with many variables.
There are tons of web sites that will offer you storage (minimal)-bandwidth (again minimal) - domain for nothing,however...you could be plagued with ads as their revenue source.
Are you looking to just design it and pass it along? |
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| Floorfiller |
I mean honestly it's pretty easy to teach yourself enough HTML5 and CCS3 via youtube videos that you could just code it from scratch. It'll be better that way. You'll learn a nice skill and you'll get what you want instead of having to deal with some template or something.
I dunno just my perspective. |
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| cryophonik |
| Agree with Floorfiller. HTML/CSS is pretty easy to learn. That said, there are plenty of really good free templates out there to get you started. A good template, some basic knowledge, and a decent free editor like MS Webmatrix will let you create exactly what you want. You'll still probably spend more time in Photoshop than anything else. |
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| DJ RANN |
Sure, for basic sites (really just online business cards), learning a bit of CSS and HTML will serve you well but good luck when you have to make responsive flipbooks, media streamers, dropdown contact forms and shopping carts - at that point you're fully fledged web dev and well you might as well insert the GoatFarming.jpg here.
For people with limited knowledge or budgets wordpess is a way to get advanced functionality for only little programming knowledge and a tiny amount of money, if not completely free.
@storyteller - I think the gripes you have are really for enterprise level businesses where downtime actually means true loss of revenue and uptime is something they are willing to pay for. For anyone running a small business or a hobby site, wordpress really does everything needed.
As for plugins there are so many different ones (i.e. 100's of 1000's now) most of which have several dozen reviews each that it's mind of easy to see which ones have flaws and which will do what you need. Granted, if you start messing with their code then things can get messy really quickly but they guy that assists me with my site really explained it's not worth trying to change a plugin, as someone else will have made what you want anyway (and he's been right every time). Of course, if you're getting in to really niche requirements then wordpress isn't what you should be looking at anyway, but you're really hard pressed to find gap in functionality in terms of plugins.
I disagree with the thing about poor quality plugins - sure there are some out there but every poor version, there's three or ten others that do the same job without the flaws and the ones sink to the bottom or get removed in many instances. It's just a case of researching them first. And again, getting in to situations where you have plugins relying on plugins is really starting to ask for trouble. It's like trying to build an F1 care out of lego. You should really be building it from the ground up when you need that kind of functionality or performance, but 90% of people and small businesses just don't need that level of site. |
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| Richard Butler |
Thanks for the thoughts, I quite quickly went for Wordpress and paid £11.
I already have an existing domain name and simply needed to re-do the entire artwork etc ready to then handover to my Brotha for him to actually then update the website with this wart work and layout.
It's already turned into a nightmare. It seems they are wanting me to handover control of the domain name to them but I cannot as this would cost my Brother money (his business owns it), plus all manner of steps to enable existing email to work - my head is spinning.
All I wanted was a simple design tool so I could add some words and images in a basic layout and hand it to my Brother
Life is never simple, eh |
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