Geeking Out: Simplicity of web design featuring WEEBLY and GreenGeeks
I have always been a tech geek but have never tried to make a website, simply because I had buddies that did it and it just sounded downright hard. Now not to take away from the hard work of web Dev’s but if you’re looking to put together a blog (maybe about your 13 cats and all the crazy and wild things they get up to) or a simple info page for your new product or small business. There are now other choices.
Recently I decided to start my own side project up here in Canada helping new upstarting business get going. For this I needed a few things like business cards, social presence and the all scary website. The cards = easy, the social presence = easy, but I don’t know anything about websites and I don’t want to have to pay some well-trained individual who would likely charge me anywhere from 500-1500 just to design my site then 100-180 a month for hosting and seo (search engine optimization). So I did what any well-armed geek would do…GOOGLE. So I started to research. First thing I needed was a web host and a domain. I spoke to about 10-15 different hosting sites, Amazon, Netfirms, Go Daddy etc… and I did not find the help a simple geek like me was looking.
After all these misses I stumble upon a wonderful hosting site call www.greekgeeks.com.
These guys were awesome. They took the time to answer all my question and make sure I picked the product. They emailed me 3 days in to make sure I had no issues and to see what kind of questions I might have. I have had to use the live chat a couple times with things like email setup, DNS changes and normal dumbass questions and they fixed and answered everything I needed. Hey for all you save the planet types they are also green powered. They offer a great selection of website tools (not that I had a clue how they worked). As I am going through all my tools and apps I saw something that looked familiar “WORDPRESS”. I was thinking hey this is one of the most popular site builders I will play with that. After about 5 hours and the worst site I have ever seen I decided to go back to the GOOGLE (yaaaaaaa). So I plug in a simple search “website builder” I look 4 option down and bam WEEBLY was there. I noticed like WordPress they offer a free set up using there XXXXXXX.weebly.com site address so I thought I would jump on and see what it is all about.
Now site builder like weebly and WordPress are theme based for the most part with very little customization on the free service. Like an android device if gives you different themes to choose from and then you just drag and drop you various widgets on to the site and fill them with your content. Now the free version is pretty simple when it comes to features but you would assume this since it is free and also says at the bottom the site made with weebly free builder. Now that being said I did love the simplicity of this service so I went ahead and paid the 100 for the year so I could now get new features like my own domain (instead of the weebly.com) add a favicon (which is the icon you see on the left of the website tile in the website bar) adding HD video, Audio, slider for photos.
All in all it worked out that I pay about $25 a month for this site and all I can say is well worth it.
Check out my site if you want to see how well a website virgin did for his first run.
Final thoughts:
If you want to create your own website and you want to keep it cheaper on your pockets I would say go to www.greengeeks.com
www.weebly.com will make it simple for people who just want to try it on their own.
I love my new site www.yoursmartstart.com and will be continually updating and changing it because it is just that easy.
