Website building skills - newbie

[SavingMon(k)ey]

I belong to a bike club that needs a better website. Ours is a POS built on Drupal that nobody can fix, and the guy who built it is basically an ass who doesn't really belong to the club, is a control freak, and doesn't want to change anything. Soooo... I would love to volunteer and build us a really simple but functional site, but I have NO skills. Is there a program that is relatively easy to learn, that I could teach myself with the help of an online tutorial, books, etc.? Drupal seemed a little crazy and over my head when I checked out a library book about it.

The main features we need on our website are: static page with info on club, blog type articles for pictures and descriptions of past rides, calendar of rides coming up, database of members, database of ride descriptions/maps, store (for memberships and club merchandise), member login to sign up for rides, ride leader login to post rides. We do have pretty nice graphics ready to go, as one of our members is a graphic designer who made a really nice logo, etc.

I don't mind if I have to invest some time learning it, as I could probably use those skills for a side hustle eventually, if I get good at it.

[gimp]

Drupal is free. https://www.google.com/#q=drupal+tutorial&safe=off

Wordpress is free. https://www.google.com/#q=wordpress+tutorial&safe=off

There are a couple others if you hate both of those.

I guess the first question is: Do you already have a website? (Yes, you do.) Who hosts it? (Who holds the files and has the server?) Do you have login privileges for the account?

[SavingMon(k)ey]

Drupal is free. https://www.google.com/#q=drupal+tutorial&safe=off

Wordpress is free. https://www.google.com/#q=wordpress+tutorial&safe=off

There are a couple others if you hate both of those.

I guess the first question is: Do you already have a website? (Yes, you do.) Who hosts it? (Who holds the files and has the server?) Do you have login privileges for the account?

Right now the ass who built it is hosting it for free because he's in that business, but the club has a small budget and would be willing to cover the costs of hosting it somewhere else. I do not have login privileges.

I was wondering about Wordpress... I have used it for a simple blog. Does the fancier version (hosted) have all those capabilities that I described? I think I could totally learn Wordpress.

[gimp]

It absolutely does.

I use BlueHost.com. Never an issue with them over the past five years. I currently pay uh... $7/month for hosting plus $12/year for the domain. Would that be in your club's budget?

You can pretty much never get below $10/year for the domain name (domain name == blahblah.com or foobar.com) but hosting can go very cheap at some companies.

Bluehost also gives you a free wordpress install. I have never used it but I assume it means that they do all the setup in an automated fashion - code and database - and let you easily customize it, set passwords, etc. I would hope. I know other hosts also have that service, I can just only speak to one!

My usual hosting advice is this: whomever you work with, do not ever work with godaddy.com. They are evil scum, and terrible at customer service. Also expensive.

[SavingMon(k)ey]

It absolutely does.

I use BlueHost.com. Never an issue with them over the past five years. I currently pay uh... $7/month for hosting plus $12/year for the domain. Would that be in your club's budget?

You can pretty much never get below $10/year for the domain name (domain name == blahblah.com or foobar.com) but hosting can go very cheap at some companies.

Bluehost also gives you a free wordpress install. I have never used it but I assume it means that they do all the setup in an automated fashion - code and database - and let you easily customize it, set passwords, etc. I would hope. I know other hosts also have that service, I can just only speak to one!

My usual hosting advice is this: whomever you work with, do not ever work with godaddy.com. They are evil scum, and terrible at customer service. Also expensive.

Thanks for the advice on BlueHost. That price sounds like it is within our budget. We have had our domain name for many years and always renew it.

What's the best way to become totally kick ass at Wordpress? (In a mustachian way, of course ;) )

[Daley]

Worldstrad, one word of advice on looking for any new potential hosting companies... be very cautious of any company that promises unlimited anything, especially on shared hosting. These are the sorts of companies that oversell their services, provide terrible to non-existent customer service, and take advantage of the gullible. Unlimited is a sucker's game in the marketplace and is used as an advertising weasel word to short-circuit your critical thinking skills by exploiting your greediness.

Nobody needs unlimited anything, nobody truly provides unlimited anything, and anyone who promises unlimited anything for any price that approaches too-good-to-be-true levels should be treated with great suspicion. Know what you actually need, research, know what fair market value with competitors are, and purchase what actually works... you'll be better off for the money spent, it will frequently cost less, and you'll get better service out of the deal. Pretty much everyone offers cPanel with a Softaculous install that does automated Wordpress installs (amongst other things), and a local bike club doesn't need to spend $7/month... especially for shared hosting that's going to be crammed onto some overstuffed server hosting 2-3000 spam domains and pushing around 15GB of data through their SQL server every hour.

If you go down this path, look into A Small Orange as a possible option as they have modest packages that would likely more than serve your needs starting at $35 a year... but don't just take my word for it as a recommendation, research just like with the other hosting recommendations anyone ever gives you.

[SavingMon(k)ey]

Thank you I.P. Daley. I have absolutely no freakin' clue when it comes to hosting, and I would definitely do lots of research. Also, there I am on the board of the club and there are some other more computer savvy people on there who have websites for their businesses, so they have some idea. It's just that nobody knows how to/is willing to learn/has the time to build a new website for us, and I think I could handle it. We have looked into paying for that service, but it's out of our league.

Anyway, if Wordpress has those capabilities, I am willing to sit down and learn it. :)

[RootofGood]

http://www.weebly.com/ is free, and comes recommended by someone else.  I started my blog recently and decided to go the paid route with one of those "unlimited" (haha) shared servers for something like $87 total for the whole first year including privacy settings, domain registration and 1 yr hosting.  I picked hostgator.com over bluehost after a little research.  Can't recall why exactly but they seemed a little better at the time and the prices were a bit better for the package I picked.

They have 1 click wordpress install and it was fairly easy to set up the blog with a few youtube tutorials and tips you can easily find.  It's amazing how much easier it is to make pretty websites now versus 10-15 years ago when I was learning to sling raw html code.  Blog type posts for a trip summary for example will look beautiful with relatively little work and you can add accounts for lots of members to post as they like. 

You can also set up emails at your domain and get them to autoforward to gmail for me (I'm justinrog@rootofgood.com for example, and all email goes straight to my main personal gmail account).   

I imagine Bluehost or any other host will probably work as well as hostgator, but that's who I used and they have worked well so far, so I recommend them.  If you want to save a few bucks, I have a 25% off code I can PM you, or go to my recommendations page on my blog. 

edited to add: Overall, I think a reasonably intelligent person who knows how to get on the internet and use a web browser (like you, my friend!) can do wordpress.  Block off a Saturday afternoon and I would bet you can throw up a decent 4-5 page site with a trip summary or two before you go to bed. 

If you could transfer your club's url to your new host that would be sweet so that any old links to your club still go to your new page.  May have to get up with the asshole webmaster guy to relinquish control if registration is locked with him. 

Also check out wordpress.com as I think you can get free blogs there, perhaps without your club name url.  Haven't used the free wordpress.com.  That is different than the wordpress.org fully functional blogger interface where you can add widgets and plugins and other cool stuff.  Wordpress.org is more feature rich but you do have to have your own host for it (=pay money for the host, wordpress itself is free).

[Daley]

Thank you I.P. Daley.

Glad to help! I just want to make sure that you don't get taken advantage of.

Also, something else to look into with hosting companies... look at their referral program. The bigger the bounty (and more disproportionate on payout to the monthly cost), the more astroturfing you're going to see from people recommending the service in general, and the harder it'll be to get honest opinions about their service.

Have a relevant to the topic recount of an issue I encountered last year.

[SavingMon(k)ey]

RootofGood, thanks for your vote of confidence that I can do this. I think I can too, though I would like to make it look really good and with my perfectionism it may take me more than an afternoon! Lol! Like I said, I have built a wordpress.com blog and know those basics, but I think what I would really like is to learn to use plugins and such on wordpress.org. The registration of our url is, as far as I know, in our control, so I won't have to deal with the ass for that part. But I may still have to get him to release our current databases and such to migrate them somewhere else (I have no effing clue on how to do that, but maybe I can learn that too!).

Any good resources on learning to build really cool stuff with wordpress.org?

[RootofGood]

RootofGood, thanks for your vote of confidence that I can do this. I think I can too, though I would like to make it look really good and with my perfectionism it may take me more than an afternoon! Lol! Like I said, I have built a wordpress.com blog and know those basics, but I think what I would really like is to learn to use plugins and such on wordpress.org. The registration of our url is, as far as I know, in our control, so I won't have to deal with the ass for that part. But I may still have to get him to release our current databases and such to migrate them somewhere else (I have no effing clue on how to do that, but maybe I can learn that too!).

Any good resources on learning to build really cool stuff with wordpress.org?

You may be further along than me since you already have content when you are starting your site.  I started from scratch and decided to create 4-5 pages of content over the first few days and then play with different themes, plugins, etc so I could see how the site looks and functions with different themes installed. 

Google was my friend.  Whenever I would have a question, I would just google it (I know, not very helpful!).  Something like "Wordpress how do I get social media share buttons".  Stick wordpress in there and it will fine tune the search results to generally wordpress.org instructions or tips.  That example search phrase returns 4-5 plugins that would potentially do exactly what I want.  And in google search, click to view the video search results and there appears to be 3-4 on point youtube instructional videos that will show you exactly how to implement them in your wordpress interface (wp-admin). 

For general tips/overview of wordpress, try "Wordpress how do I get started" or something similar.  I found an hour long tutorial on youtube, watched it, and then watched another 10 minute vid and that's when I figured out I could do wordpress with a little (a lot actually) help from youtube and google. 

And if you have a little budget for it, you can apparently hire people for $5 to do some simple wordpress stuff from places like fiverr.com.  May be cool to pay a few bucks for micro consulting as you need it.  If you get stuck and don't feel like spending hours bashing your head against the wall that is. 

So far I have only encountered one thing that I couldn't figure out from google.  Some brainpower and thinking about what could be causing the problem led to a quick fix and a "duh" moment for me (an earlier fix I implemented broke some google analytics tracking, so I just undid the first fix). 

I've also googled tiny bits of raw html code, like how to do a link that opens a window in a new page, and how to insert an image with a http link referenced to it.  The latter was to try to put a particular piece of advertising on my page. Only takes a few minutes to figure out the relatively easy html syntax.  Similar in difficulty to understanding the codes here on this bulletin board software - the [ b ] BOLD TEXT GOES HERE [ / b ] if you needed to modify the post formatting manually.

[kittrad]

I think these days, even a complete newbie can start up their own site on their own. Thanks to those site builders from HG for example.