This is the aging, decrepit Web site I first built for my business nearly 20 years ago using MS FrontPage. I haven’t changed its design significantly in all that time. [Pauses for gasps of horror, screams of laughter, and howls of derision.]
Yes, it’s horrible and desperately needs to be updated. The problem is that the site is not a revenue source in and of itself. I make my money from subscriptions to the print-only newsletter; the site serves primarily as a marketing device for the newsletter. So I can’t spend huge sums of money on it. (I know what you’re thinking: print-only? WTF?!? Why not put your content online? Please, let’s save that discussion for later. Thanks.)
So I’d like to find a simple web building site, service, or software package that, like FrontPage 20 years ago, will allow me – a non-programmer – to design, build, and maintain a website with all the modern features, like mobile compatibility.
The main sticking point is that I’d like to include updated versions of these three databasequerypages that a friend of mine coded for me in ASP about 20 years ago. Are there tools that will let me do that myself, or will I have to hire a programmer again? (The underlying data is in the Access 2010 database I use for my business.)
I know that there are millions of do-it-yourself website builders, and I’ve looked at some of them. I use WordPress for a different business, but I’m not crazy about it. I don’t find it as intuitive and easy to use as I expected it to be. But because there are so many other possibilities, it’s hard to know which might be best for my purposes without spending lots of time to try out a bunch. For instance, I happen to use GoDaddy as my registrar, but not for hosting. Is its web builder any good?
I recently built my brother’s portfolio using Google sites. It’s free if you have a google email account. I thought it wsa easy to use. I got hung up on organizing page sets a couple of times, but that’s just me.
The right panel has three tabs: Insert, Pages and Themes. Use Insert to insert text, images and standard features. Use Pages to see your pages and branchings. Themes has several pregenerated themes you can choose from so you don’t have to worry about formatting.
Don’t know offhand how you handle search functions, but Google may consider it a gadget that you can add.
I have built several websites and had several built. One way to go is to hire someone from a place like upwork. You can hire people by the job or by the hour. I have worked with one specific programmer for about 10 years who is from Bangladesh, and completely reliable. He teaches programming at a community college. If you want his contact info you can pm me.
I would look at their design work ahead of time, and ask about skills you need like converting or programming asp. If you keep things simple, maybe you can get by with $200 or so. This is so much easier than learning website design again by yourself unless you want to do it as a hobby or something. They will know, for example, how to make it mobile responsive.
Personally, I like WordPress as a base and have other people program the difficult parts.
I’m an ASP programmer who is looking to do some extra work this winter. I’ve been working with Bootstrap a lot this year and enjoying it - it is a really great framework for making sites cross-compatible in Mobile and Desktop.
I’d have to do a little research on how to connect Access to an application (I haven’t worked with Access in a while, just SQL Server) but otherwise I’ve got all the skills.
If you want to stick with custom-built and ASP, send me a PM.
Most of your site is pretty static, meaning that you only need a little bit of ASP support for your database stuff.
Your site uses a lot of non-semantic HTML, for example, using tables to control layout. You don’t want to do that anymore. You want to keep simple lists, paragraphs, and headlines. Essentially, you want your HTML to render like the first web page in the browser.
Next, you want to learn and use CSS to control the display. You don’t need fancy frameworks and JavaScript to do this, and it can be completely mobile-friendly and adaptive to different screen sizes with pure CSS. You can use a lot of CSS and fancy frameworks if you don’t mind bloat or insist on having lots and lots of fancy features, though, but your site isn’t an “app”; it’s a web site.
If you don’t want to hand write all of the HTML, you can build most of your pages with a static site generator, for example, Middleman or Jekyll. These let you use Markdown to write your content, and turn them into semantic HTML pages which are then easy to style with CSS. Here’s a simple site using semantic HTML, styled with CSS, and uses only a tiny bit of JavaScript, built from Markdown using Jekyll. The HTML is simple enough to write on its own without needing something like Jekyll.
I have been using the interwebz since its inception. One of the things that has annoyed me is “fancy” websites that are more flash than, you know, useful.
It is probably a good idea to make a mobile version of your site, but please don’t make it less functional in the process. There is nothing more annoying than trying to do business with a website that requires multiple steps to actually buy something. One of he only things my father said that made sense was “take the money”.
Bumping this thread because I really want to do something about updating my site.
I am frustrated because the two features I need most in the new site are 1) the static data tables that Balthisar tells me I shouldn’t have any more, but which seem to be the most popular pages on the site, and 2) the database query pages.
I’ve tried using WordPress and Squarespace, and if my site didn’t need these two features, I’d be fine with a DIY web-building site like them. But I don’t see a way to accomplish what I want to do there by myself, and I’m paralyzed by the prospect of trying to find someone to help me with the work because I can’t spend a lot of money, there are so many choices, and I don’t know exactly what I need.
For instance, is there a better way to display large tables like this one?
Is it possible to incorporate my existing ASP queries into a new site?
It’s frustrating because I used to be able to do everything myself (except the ASP programming) with MS FrontPage, which was far from perfect, but allowed me to create a design I was happy with, and control my content. The DIY sites I’ve tried use templates that don’t behave the way I expect them do, and don’t let me have as much control as I’d like. (Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky.)
I’ve been a professional web programmer for the past ~3 years, plus personal projects for a couple more. Your website looks fine to me. The only thing I see that is out of date is that it’s not going to show up well on mobile devices.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with using tables to display actual tabular data. That’s what the <table> tags are there for. It’s when you use it to control your layout that it gets iffy. But frankly, some of the alternatives are so fussy, I would take any “OMG YOU CAN’T DO THAT” statements with a grain of salt.
I’m even dubious about the need for CSS - it’s really good for consistency across web pages, but you don’t HAVE to use it. If you’re a single person maintaining the website and you can manage to use the same colors and fonts all the time (and don’t think that you will change the colors or fonts multiple times), you don’t really need all the other bells and whistles that css can give you.
Are you aware that you can create html files in Microsoft Word?