I need to set up a basic “brochure” web site for my business. (I am a solo practitioner attorney).
Nothing fancy, just a few pages explaining what I do and giving directions to my office. And of course it must look at least semi-professional.
Is it worth doing on my own? Are there any great software packages out there? Is it necessary to hire someone?
Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
You can do it yourself.
You need to learn what you are doing, so if you are a solo practioner you may not get the time to learn enough to do what you want to do.
Basic HTML is pretty, er, basic and from the sound of it, that’s all you want to do. ie. No scripting, database work, etc.
If you want graphics, you can get them created for a price, or you can scan your letter head and play around with that (but you may not have the time to make it look ‘clean’). As an attorney, you probably don’t want to rip off other peoples graphics.
There are software packages out there that will make nice pages for you. Things like Dreamweaver and Frontpage are relatively cheap(ish) and as they are WYSIWYG editors, you can get the feel of what you will finally see.
You can use WORD to create HTML, but don’t. It creates worse code than FP and is a real pain to maintain.
It’s not necessary to hire someone if you want to take the time to learn HTML, but you may put in a bunch of hours (for which you may be taking tmie away from your practice) whereas someone else might be able to do it in a couple of hours.
You should also consider maintenance and whether you think you will have lots (cheaper in the long run to learn and maintain yourself) or whether it will be minimal.
It appears you may already have the content and from there, it’s agreeing on a ‘look and feel’ for your navigation and pages, formatting the HTML around your content and loading up to a webserver.
If you have a domain name and host, this can be achieved quickly using FTP or some such transfer.
If you need to register a domain, you’ll be up for some bucks and a couple of days while the domain name propogates through the name servers.
Ditto for a host.
It can be done, it depends on how much time you are willing to invest or whether you can find someone to help you for a minimal cost / free.
There are probably many dopers who can help you create the HTML, but the Mods may not appreciate them offering their services on the boards for a fee.
If you would like more information, my email addy is in my profile.
i second what Caught@work said. Setting up a small website is relatively easy (if a little time consuming)
The hard part (and the part that most people fall down on) is making it not look amateurish. It may be handy if you talk to people about what looks good on the web, what fonts are best to use etc. etc.
Its certainly possible to do it yourself though and if you are interested in the web and computers then you’ll certainly enjoy doing it.
I know Caught@work has already offered - but i’m just as happy to give you more information and answer questions etc. Just drop me an email.
Yeah, I kinda figured that. Actually, I expect the next couple weeks to be kinda slow, so I might have the time. Assuming I’m reasonably facile with computers (I was a computer guy in college), is it possible to do in a weekend?
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Correct.
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Hmmm, I wonder if I could get in trouble for plagiarizing somebody’s website. (I found a guy in Idaho who has a nice one!!)
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Are they worth it?
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Ok, I won’t.
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Roughly speaking, how much would I have to pay somebody to create the sort of website I described?
And thanks guys for the thoughts you have shared.
www.geocities.com is a good place to start. They have basic packages which are free, to more professional ones with Site Wizards for a small monthly fee. I used them to start up my website and found it very easy. It might be good to start with a template like Geocities if you don’t have any web building experience.
My advice? Pay a local HS or college kid to do it for, um, $50 for the design and the first page and $10 for each additional pages.
Make sure that it has to work on all browsers and the kid doesn’t use FrontPage.
If I may ask, what’s wrong with FrontPage?
It writes excess and un-necessary code
It writes code how Microsoft thinks it should be written, not how the rest of the world thinks it should be written. (Which can cause users using non-Microsoft Web Browsers problems)
For some reason it just seems to be predisposed to designing “Ugly” sites - God knows why. 
Ok, I’ll steer clear of FrontPage. By the way, here is the website that I would like to use as inspiration for my own:
http://www.pattersonlawoffices.com/
Any clue as to which software package created it? (If any). If it was FrontPage, then . . . I guess I’ll deal!
had a quick look - nice and simple site, very straightforward to do.
i’d say pick up a decent book on html and do it yourself. Its seriously not that hard.
as i say - if you want advice or anything just drop me an email.
And you’ll get what you pay for, too!
Sure, there are some kids who will turn out a decent page or two for cheap change. You stand a better chance to find someone with the skills and experience to analyze your needs, suggest some layouts and do quality work, for a price.
At the end of the day, a web site is an extension of your business. I see too many “professional” web sites done on the cheap. A cheap site reflects on your business.
I know top quality folks who will turn out top quality web sites and you will not go wrong. Sure it may cost you $250 to $500, but at the end of the day you do get what you pay for.
And stay away from geocities and other similar “hosting” sites. As a lawyer I suggest you read the fine print for those “hosting” sites. You may be surprised just how little ownership you have with your own site hosted by geocities and similar. Ironically, for about the same costs you can have your own web site with your own domain hosted by a quality company that offers top notch service.
Looks like handcoded HTML (using notepad or similar), in that there is no meta tag that describes the original editor.
Hmmm. IANAL, but I wouldn’t see an issue in replicating the style, provided your content was essentially different.
I can’t tell if the graphics are original or not, but as there is only the sidebar graphics that cathes your eye, you could substitue a similar one and achieve a similar look and feel.
Can you get pinged in courrt for copying look and feel (but not direct content) from a website ?? Dunno.
Yes, your college student can make something for you for prices as discussed and as long as you have the style you like, the code is not the problem.
As mentioned above, getting the style and navigation right is the hardest part. The content and code is easy.
If you wanted to pay someone to ‘borrow’ this site and its look and feel (as you seem to like it), you should be able to get away with a minimal cost for creation. Then comes maintenance, with a professional, you may get a maintenance contract that lasts 12 months (in case you forget something), wehereas your college kid might be busy next time you want them.
IMHO, go for your own domain. GeoCities Banner Ads on lawyers sites makes me wary for some reason. You can get really cheap hosting (from a buck a month to something with better service levels for 10-20 per month).
You’ll also need to submit your end-site to a search engine (or two) so when people search they can find you. This will mean the need to include META TAGS (which the engines use to categorise your site).
You can pay for submissions to some engines, but Google which uses DMOZ (I’m pretty sure), you can submit to free. It might take a while to get your free submission listed (couple of weeks / months), so don’t submit and expect it to be the number 1 return the next day.
Your professional may be willing to submit on your behalf (as part of the cost) whereas your college kid may not.
Is a couple of hundred dollars out of the question for a professional design / construct should be the type of question you are asking yourself.
You can get away with it for less than $100 (college kid / friend / SDMB member) or for $500 a pro. Any more than about $500 (assuming you instruct them to follow the site cite above) and they are probably not worth it.
On, the FP issue, if you let FP do what it wants (and you aren’t sure of what it is doing) you can get really UGLY code with DIV’s and SPAN’s and custom styles, left, right and center. If you know enough about HTML and the product, you can instruct FP not to do that and it tends to write cleanish code. I haven’t used DreamWeaver in a long, ong time, so I can’t offer realistic comparisons. As you are just starting out, I would not recommend FP for the reasons just stated, in that as your will be untrained in how to effectively use the package, you will likely end up with horrible to maintain (and slow to load) code.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest just borrowing this guy’s code, re-doing it so you’re not just stealing his design. The HTML he used is very, very basic. This took me about 15 minutes using the source code from the site you linked. I inserted my own images and fudged the colors and sizes randomly. You’d want to pick your own colors and styles, of course - what I picked randomly is ugly. Sorry too for the slow image loading; I didn’t take the time to optimize the random .jpg I pulled off my hard drive.
Read the source code, and if you think it makes some sense, go for it. This is how you learn to do web design - start with a site you like, borrow the code, and start tweaking.
On review, it still looks too similar. Let me just tweak those colors some more… stand by.
There. Much uglier. You get the idea.
I hope my philosophy of web design isn’t offensive to any real designers out there. But how else do you start learning to do it, except by studying the code of others?
Whoa ! You’re not kidding with the ugly
But that’s the way to do it. That’s the way I started.
Look, practice, learn some more, make a mess, start again, play around. I’m just not sure that lucwarm has the time initially to play around.
He may be better getting someone to create the initial site and then play around with maintenance in his spare time. Then if he finds he doesn’t like HTML, he hasn’t spent a lot of effort learning something and making a botch of it and he still get’s a site in the meantime.
Nooooo. If it was done by a professional I can guarantee you that it’s copyrighted, and we tend to get pissy if people steal our ideas.
If you want to do it yourself with a WYSIWYG, Dreamweaver is about (I think) $300, and FrontPage does suck in so many ways. I’m not sure about HomeSite, I’ve never used it. At the same time, if you use a freelancer, you’ll probably spend about the same, and more than likely it’ll look better. I agree about using a student… if it ends up looking amateurish, no one who sees your website is gonna be very impressed. You’d be better off not having any website at all.
You can get hosting and domains pretty darn cheap nowadays. I can recommend a couple hosts if you’re interested. I also freelance, FWIW. You can check out my website if you care to, and contact me that way if you were interested in hosting recommendations or whatnot. www.autumneve.com.
Not to hijack, but how much would need to be changed to make sure you wouldn’t get pissy.
There are lots of designs that look similar and this one looks pretty standard (heading, side nav and bottom nav).
I’m not talking about microsoft or sites like that, but a pretty slim site like this I could design without even knowing I was ripping someone else off.
I think the graphic would give this one away, but what else would be ‘copyrighted’?
Legally? I don’t know, you’d need to talk to a copyright lawyer about that. It does become more difficult when it’s such a basic look – I’m saying in general not to assume you can “borrow” something, expecting to make money from what you took (via increased business), and not to get in trouble. If you’re not sure, contact the guy and ask. If he did it himself, it’s unlikely he cares about copyright. If he hired someone, he could probably refer you on.
I think the general legal guideline is if it looks “substantially similar” to the original. In general I would say that any graphic elements would have to be completely different (the logo and sidebar), as well as the color scheme. But “substantially similar” is a pretty subjective idea.