My wife is a professional harpist (with her doctorate in musical performance). She needs to develop a website to act as a showcase / business card / advertisement. She specialty is classical and orchestra music, but she has worked in other styles.
I need advice on software for website development and hosting. In years past I’ve done some minor web design with Microsoft FrontPage and a few other easy web design tools. Her site should look professional and be able allow users to listen to an example of some of her recordings and possibly show video (maybe just YouTube imbedded). We are probably going to use a domain name based on her name.
We want a professional looking site, but are on a budget. I don’t mind spending sometime learning new software and code, but don’t want it to be too time consuming. Oh for the last part, she will have her schedule of upcoming performances and whatever we use should make it easy for her (computer savvy but not quite a comfortable with new software) to update the schedule.
We are a mixed PC/Mac household.
Any advice is appreciated on hosting and design. I’m sorry if this is covered a thousand times here but my searches weren’t getting any useful results.
I like Wordpress, mostly because I coded websites for WAAAAY too long and Wordpress lets me get crap out there without a lot of hassle ( http://www.oddfiddlythings.com )
If you do go with Wordpress, IMHO you REALLY should go with a hosted solution rather than just getting a bare hosting account and installing/maintaining it yourself. Wordpress has had many, many security holes over the years. Several of those have allowed spammers and to modify the site to install malware, links to spam sites, etc. You really don’t want that. To avoid it, you need to keep up to date on Wordpress versions (meaning you should update as soon as a new version is out, not just when you get around to it), which I found to be more of a chore than I really wanted to deal with. Hosted Wordpress takes care of that stuff for you.
Drupal and e107 are the big two of free content managers. I like 1and1 for a webhost. They are inexpensive and have free private registration of domain names. They usually run specials at the beginning of the month. GoDaddy is OK too.
You can learn simple XHTML and make a decent professional looking site. You can look around Dynamic Drive and get basic designs. A good book like Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML will get you help you learn the skills for a basic website that looks professional.
Definitely check out Hostgator. They have 3 different plans and each one has flexible payment periods. I get unlimited bandwidth and storage. I use it mainly for backups to the ftp server but regularly upload several gig with no problems or complaints.
You also get a couple dozen tools and utilities in the CPanel - most of which are either industry standard or close to it - things like MySQL, FTP manager, etc.
Thank you everyone for pointing us in good directions to explore. I’d heard of WordPress, but kind of lumped it as being the same as CafePress. We’ll read up a little on the different options everyone mentioned.