Build your own website websites - opinions please!
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An idea I wish I'd thought of first is a website where you can choose a template, upload some of your own copy, hit go, and bang! You've got your own customised business website. It's easy to get going, easy to update and, or so they claim, it is search engine friendly. I've done enough web development to not need to use these myself, but in the interests of being able to recommend the best options to people I'd like to hear what the CP community thinks of these sorts of sites? - Does anybody have any first hand experience with one of these sorts of sites? - Any ideas what the pros and cons are vs. me doing things the old fashioned way with ASP.Net? (I have a few theories but nothing with any evidence) Chris Edit: To be clear, I'm not asking for recommendations about a site to use, just about pros and cons of actually using them.
IMHO, they are a nice re-direct for people with stupid business ideas who try to get me to build a site for them. Look, if I do the work for you it would be expensive. Have you thought about building your own at freewebsitefordorks.com? You'd save a ton of cash and you'd have control over your site.
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IMHO, they are a nice re-direct for people with stupid business ideas who try to get me to build a site for them. Look, if I do the work for you it would be expensive. Have you thought about building your own at freewebsitefordorks.com? You'd save a ton of cash and you'd have control over your site.
I'd not thought of it that way - you're absolutely right. However, I have a client who is the other way round: they're insisting on using one of these and I'm of the opinion that it'd be better to do things properly. Seems to me that it'd be better to have control over everything so I can do exciting things like logging customer enquiries, automatically generating quotes based on inputs, or AB testing my site etc etc all of which need control of the back end a bit more. But maybe I'm just behind the times and these sites are capable of 90% of what I need anyway...
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I'd not thought of it that way - you're absolutely right. However, I have a client who is the other way round: they're insisting on using one of these and I'm of the opinion that it'd be better to do things properly. Seems to me that it'd be better to have control over everything so I can do exciting things like logging customer enquiries, automatically generating quotes based on inputs, or AB testing my site etc etc all of which need control of the back end a bit more. But maybe I'm just behind the times and these sites are capable of 90% of what I need anyway...
It may be good to direct the client to the canned sites. At the very least they'll get a good idea of what they really want/need and at the end of a few months they may come to you with a well formed request. For example, the client should be able to say, "The canned site does everything I need except X,Y, and Z". By that point the frustration of working with a canned site may also work in your favor. I'm only guessing here as I don't have the client's details. Good luck.
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I'd not thought of it that way - you're absolutely right. However, I have a client who is the other way round: they're insisting on using one of these and I'm of the opinion that it'd be better to do things properly. Seems to me that it'd be better to have control over everything so I can do exciting things like logging customer enquiries, automatically generating quotes based on inputs, or AB testing my site etc etc all of which need control of the back end a bit more. But maybe I'm just behind the times and these sites are capable of 90% of what I need anyway...
I always love to build things myself as well, but think of it this way.... take Wordpress as an example. How long would it take you to create all of the functionality out that with the existing plugins that a customer would want. Now I would love that kind of a contract, but sometimes the customers know about CMS systems or read about them somewhere and all that they can do. DNN, Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, etc... all of them have lots of plugins and even skins to purchase or instructions on how to convert a css skin to the site.
Steve Maier
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It may be good to direct the client to the canned sites. At the very least they'll get a good idea of what they really want/need and at the end of a few months they may come to you with a well formed request. For example, the client should be able to say, "The canned site does everything I need except X,Y, and Z". By that point the frustration of working with a canned site may also work in your favor. I'm only guessing here as I don't have the client's details. Good luck.
Yeah, that occurred to me. The issue though would be switching later - suppose they're on somesitebuilder.com/clientbusinessname and people bookmark them, how do you then manage the conversion to clientbusinessname.com? Do you ignore the link rot and risk losing customers or do you maintain the original site with redirects (transparently redirecting or otherwise) which costs money forever onwards? I guess what I missed from my original post is that there is a non-zero cost of changing your mind after the fact. Thanks for your input - I need all the luck I can get with this one!
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I always love to build things myself as well, but think of it this way.... take Wordpress as an example. How long would it take you to create all of the functionality out that with the existing plugins that a customer would want. Now I would love that kind of a contract, but sometimes the customers know about CMS systems or read about them somewhere and all that they can do. DNN, Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, etc... all of them have lots of plugins and even skins to purchase or instructions on how to convert a css skin to the site.
Steve Maier
I agree with that sentiment, but those aren't quite what I meant - I'm thinking more of a hosted service. More along the lines of using Wordpress.com (hosted version) for your site than Wordpress.org (where you download then host the software yourself). As I've said in another comment above, what I probably should have explained better is not that I'm against these sites as such, but that I recognise that there is a non-zero cost of switching away from them later. If I were using my own install of WP then issues like link rot are trivially solved.
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An idea I wish I'd thought of first is a website where you can choose a template, upload some of your own copy, hit go, and bang! You've got your own customised business website. It's easy to get going, easy to update and, or so they claim, it is search engine friendly. I've done enough web development to not need to use these myself, but in the interests of being able to recommend the best options to people I'd like to hear what the CP community thinks of these sorts of sites? - Does anybody have any first hand experience with one of these sorts of sites? - Any ideas what the pros and cons are vs. me doing things the old fashioned way with ASP.Net? (I have a few theories but nothing with any evidence) Chris Edit: To be clear, I'm not asking for recommendations about a site to use, just about pros and cons of actually using them.
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Thanks but I wasn't looking for recommendations as such - I'm more interested in whether or not these sorts of sites are generally a good idea. That said, perhaps a concrete example will help: do you have experience with Ning? If so what have you found to be the pros and cons of using it?
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An idea I wish I'd thought of first is a website where you can choose a template, upload some of your own copy, hit go, and bang! You've got your own customised business website. It's easy to get going, easy to update and, or so they claim, it is search engine friendly. I've done enough web development to not need to use these myself, but in the interests of being able to recommend the best options to people I'd like to hear what the CP community thinks of these sorts of sites? - Does anybody have any first hand experience with one of these sorts of sites? - Any ideas what the pros and cons are vs. me doing things the old fashioned way with ASP.Net? (I have a few theories but nothing with any evidence) Chris Edit: To be clear, I'm not asking for recommendations about a site to use, just about pros and cons of actually using them.
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An idea I wish I'd thought of first is a website where you can choose a template, upload some of your own copy, hit go, and bang! You've got your own customised business website. It's easy to get going, easy to update and, or so they claim, it is search engine friendly. I've done enough web development to not need to use these myself, but in the interests of being able to recommend the best options to people I'd like to hear what the CP community thinks of these sorts of sites? - Does anybody have any first hand experience with one of these sorts of sites? - Any ideas what the pros and cons are vs. me doing things the old fashioned way with ASP.Net? (I have a few theories but nothing with any evidence) Chris Edit: To be clear, I'm not asking for recommendations about a site to use, just about pros and cons of actually using them.
I've used them back in the day, as I was learning web coding. I would set up a layout that I like, then take the source and stylesheets, remove the bloat (they typically add A LOT of extraneous garbage), substitute my own graphics, and use what remained as my published result. If you are working with a client, that might be a sane approach: steer the client to a design-your-site site and having him select a layout, color scheme, etc. Then you can take the result and tweaking it to the client's liking.
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I've used them back in the day, as I was learning web coding. I would set up a layout that I like, then take the source and stylesheets, remove the bloat (they typically add A LOT of extraneous garbage), substitute my own graphics, and use what remained as my published result. If you are working with a client, that might be a sane approach: steer the client to a design-your-site site and having him select a layout, color scheme, etc. Then you can take the result and tweaking it to the client's liking.
That's an interesting idea but I'd be inclined not to follow this method: if a client designs a site this way I expect they would become attached to it even if I can improve on it. That potentially means more arguments with them... Then to give them something that they basically did themselves it's much harder to justify my fees. I'd also feel a bit dark side taking the code for myself... I agree that it's a good way of learning stuff though - no arguments there.
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Thanks but I wasn't looking for recommendations as such - I'm more interested in whether or not these sorts of sites are generally a good idea. That said, perhaps a concrete example will help: do you have experience with Ning? If so what have you found to be the pros and cons of using it?
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An idea I wish I'd thought of first is a website where you can choose a template, upload some of your own copy, hit go, and bang! You've got your own customised business website. It's easy to get going, easy to update and, or so they claim, it is search engine friendly. I've done enough web development to not need to use these myself, but in the interests of being able to recommend the best options to people I'd like to hear what the CP community thinks of these sorts of sites? - Does anybody have any first hand experience with one of these sorts of sites? - Any ideas what the pros and cons are vs. me doing things the old fashioned way with ASP.Net? (I have a few theories but nothing with any evidence) Chris Edit: To be clear, I'm not asking for recommendations about a site to use, just about pros and cons of actually using them.
Given that there are a finite number of templates to choose from, sites using this method tend to look very similar to each other - especially when the site creators use the default settings for almost everything (not generally being technically / artistically creative) - memorable sites want to stand out from the crowd
Steve _________________ I C(++) therefore I am
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Given that there are a finite number of templates to choose from, sites using this method tend to look very similar to each other - especially when the site creators use the default settings for almost everything (not generally being technically / artistically creative) - memorable sites want to stand out from the crowd
Steve _________________ I C(++) therefore I am