I'm wanting to set up my own website and have no idea where to start etc.

I know I need to buy my .com and .co.uk sites which is fine, but where do I go to start up a website? I need something in colour with photos to be added, but something very user friendly for a business.

Any help, tips and ideas then please post below.

Ta x

You can set one up completely free with Awardspace http://www.awardspace.com/, and no adverts and plenty of space.

I have my deceased mentors site on with them, ans also about half of mine as was running out of space with my service provider.

When virgin took over from Telewest the allocation was supposed to go to 100MB from the 55MB I have now (still ahsn't ahppened).  I could just about keep all my pages on my original sever but it was getting tight so I have split it.

http://www.webs.com is by far the easiest to set-up and use that I've come across.  If you can cope with the adverts appearing at the top it is free, if not for a small annual charge you can go ad-free. There are other packages available, which again are reasonably priced, depends what you want to do.

I don't want random ad's popping up, that is for sure.

Once set up I want to be able to adjust and amend when I need to and update and no extra charges.

Also as its for a business how do I make it pop up on a google type search? Is this going to cost me more for it to be near the top of a search on my business in the area?

I've got a business and use the ad-free option. There is a section within the tools that you can put "ad-words" that will come up when searched on google (and some others I think). I get quite a few enquiries and don't advertise heavily so it must be doing something.

Sue it might be an idea to contact your local college. At this time of year they are usually looking for student projects and they might build one for you. Worth a try?

> Also as its for a business how do I make it pop up on a google type search?

Have a look at Google AdWords, you can set the limit of how much you wish to pay, you also choose as many keywords as you want. I'm told that if you advertise with them for a couple of months and then stop for a whille (which I haven't done yet) that they will often send you vouchers to get you advertising again. Good luck.

Thank you all for the ideas and recommendations. I'll be going through them all this weekend and hopefully will have a website set up shortly :-)  Fingers crossed..

I use Just Host.
It's not free, but they have very cheap 'starter' packages. We pay £5.99 per month and that includes our domain name www(my buisiness name).com, aswell as as many email addresses that you want - again that would be 'whatever' @ businessname.com . This is web-mail, so you can access from any computer.

Had no problem intergrating PayPal shopping into our site.

My OH is not very 'techy' but after a morning fiddling with the web-site (and accidently deleting it ), he is now able to up-date it himself and has even gievn our site a complete re-design on his own.

Worth a look.

For a small business website I'd recommend Create.net - from £4.99 a month and the sites have loads of features. I used to use Mr Site but found that their reliability & service went rapidly downhill last year.

Create sites are very easy to set up if you're not savvy with coding language etc, and are web based so you can update the site from anywhere.

For search results, you need to ensure that you have lots of relevant keywords & phrases in your website text, this will help to drive your page up the search rankings, as will metatags on each page.

My site is in my profile (not dog related) - I've built that with Create and I rank No.1 on google for my business name, and 1st 2 pages for most of the search results I wanted my page to come up for - I'm not all that techy, and haven't paid any extra to anyone for this, it's all done using relevant keywords.

I don't know if I can mention other forums on here, but there's a small business forum I occasinally use - if you pm me I'll happily let you know the address - it's great for advice :)

Claire

Can anyone recommend a cheap domain name registry? I have a name I'd like to make my own :)

i used microsft office ( free with hotmail) for my website, and 123-reg for my domain names :)

I used moonfruit for my current site.
Found it very easy and fun to use compared to others I have used in the past and it was not that expensive either.