Building a website for my business

omnipotent1

Hi
Thanks for taking the time to read my post.
I am looking to set up a website for my new business (nothing major just 1 page with contact details and a few pics etc) I will also be looking for an email address with the companies name.
I see lots of companies advertising the service of web hosting and buying the domain. Can anyone advise me is this the route I need to go down or is there a way I can buy it for a one off fee. I may look to sell from my website eventually but not for a few year.
Thanks

jimmii

Those free websites normally have their name in the address and will also advertise heavily on your page. You can register a .ie for around €20 and a lot of hosting companies have a basic site builder you can use to make it yourself its pretty straight forward.

[Hosting discussions and recommends are not allowed]

Graham

Whatever solution you go with you're going to be looking at an annual fee for the domain name and the hosting although neither should cost a huge amount.

I'm afraid we can't recommend any specific hosting companies as that's long since been forbidden here on boards.

There are a few web site builders, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace etc that would probably suit you for an easy to create, reasonably professional looking small website. It's worth pointing out that you if you outgrow their basic templates/services you will probably need to move provider and you won't be able to take your site with you. I don't think any of them offer email so you'd probably need to buy that separately (Google/Microsoft 365).

tricky D

Hosting talk, particularly recommendations, is big taboo area on boards for good reasons. The only permitted post with a list of companies is here: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=53028341&postcount=2

Have google for 'how to choose a hosting company' for more info.

On the fees structure, you'll usually a pay monthly or annual fee for services.

Lastly, invest properly in your business website aka avoid free.

omnipotent1

thanks lads
very helpful

Niall OConnor

What I would say is to choose a hosting provider.. and a .ie domain name from there I would suggest using wordpress as it is one of the best out there if you have any questions you can PM me!

Zascar

Gogole irish Web Host and get one of the basica packages with any of the major ones. Its going to cost a few quid per year, no way around that.

How do you plan to build the website?

deegs

back in the day I used to charge 4000 to design websites, Id throw in hosting for a year then charge 200 p/a after that. Those were the days of easy money, but also a high tech barrier....
That tech barrier is gone... You could get hosting for 50 quid a year and a domain for 20. Regarding website design... I bought this design for 10quid for the site template and just changed the content and images myself.... but I think if I got back into web design I could charge a lot more than 10quid...

www.closr.com

mneylon

In order to get your business online you need two things:

1. Domain name
2. Hosting

You can register a domain name for up to 10 years.

Hosting - most companies offer monthly and annual billing. Some offer discounts for multiple years - and you might even find companies offering "lifetime" hosting.

Generally speaking most businesses pay for hosting and a domain annually.

There's no way to do a "once off" as you never really own the domain name - you just have a license to use it.

Building / designing a site - there are sitebuilder services out there (as mentioned by others), a lot of hosting companies will offer a sitebuilder of some kind, but if you want more flexibility using Wordpress or similar is probably a better option. There are thousands of free and cheap themes you can get for Wordpress, so you can put together a fairly attractive website without needing the services of a designer etc.,
However, paying for good design is a worthwhile investment. Remember that for many people your website is going to be the first impression they get of your business, so if it looks "cheap and nasty" .. ...

If you want to sell online there are a LOT of options open to you and thankfully there is competition in the market these days.
At the simplest level you could use Paypal, though their fees are quite high.
If you are going to be serious about selling online you'll probably end up getting your own merchant account with your bank and using Realex payments (or similar) to handle the transactions.

HTH

Michele

deegs

while id agree with most of the above, I'd be wary of free or cheap templates. A specific requirement for mine was HTML5, Foundation5, responsive and parallax. While you can get cheap and free, make sure what you source is legit and well coded... some of the wordpress themes are not, and contain bloated source.