[Techtalk] Helping non-techies with websites -- any experience?

[Cynthia Kiser]

Personally I think the hard part of a professional looking site is design.
And that is something that the various commercial offerings, Weebly,
SquareSpace, WordPress.com, offer. Personally I would suggest people start
on SquareSpace. Their templates are pretty nice. The editing UI are pretty
good. And, if they decide later they want features they can only get on
WordPress, SquareSpace has an export feature (and an import if you want to
come from WordPress).

On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 7:37 PM, Akkana Peck <akkana at shallowsky.com> wrote:

> Hi, all --
>
> Do you help non-techie friends create websites? With image galleries?
>
> I have several non-techie artist friends who would like to set up
> websites to showcase their art, as well as other friends who want
> an easy way to maintain websites for organizations they volunteer for.
>
> I'm never sure what to tell them, because I'm a geek and my own
> website is HTML with a smattering of PHP, Javascript, CSS and Python
> as needed, hosted on a VPS that my husband and I admin.
>
> There are simple drag-and-drop type sites like Weebly, but what I've
> seen of those suggests that they're a hassle to maintain if it gets
> beyond a few pages, and they don't offer many options for styling.
> However, Weebly and GoDaddy do say they offer drag-and-drop image
> galleries.
>
> At the other end, one friend is wondering if she should host at
> Wordpress.com, because she wants a professional looking site and
> likes all the styles they offer. I've helped a little on a site
> running on Wordpress on another server, and although I mostly stay
> away from the Wordpress admin (I mostly write backend PHP code for
> them) I do see what goes into choosing and installing plugins and
> themes, and it looks like a lot of work. Is that a lot easier when
> the site is hosted on Wordpress.com?
>
> I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets asked about setting up
> websites. What do you tell your smart but non-techie friends?
> How about your extremely technophobic friends? (I suspect these
> may be two different answers, and I'm interested in both.)
>
> Thanks for any insights!
>
>         ...Akkana
>
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-- 
Cynthia Kiser
cynthia.kiser at gmail.com