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How to build a website in two hours

Posted on 18 Jun 2009 at 10:57

With a little bit of help from wordpress, Kevin Partner reveals how to design and launch a website in a couple of hours.

Two months ago, I bemoaned the poor quality of books that purport to teach the various disciplines required to build a website from scratch, such as HTML/XHTML, CSS, graphic design/typography and interactivity - many of them teach newcomers wrong and deprecated techniques. I had a lot of reader response and I'm developing a resource to help. To find out more (or to get involved), send me an email.

A knock-on effect of this poor training is that great care is needed when picking a developer for your new site: unless they use current best practices you'll be stuck with a site that's hard to maintain, practically impossible to upgrade, and difficult for search engines to find. So, not surprisingly, ever more technically aware business people are deciding to go it alone and bypass the web development community entirely. They see a website as a means to an end and want it up and running as soon as possible, so they don't want to learn raw coding, but they're no less demanding about the functionality they expect it to have. Until recently, the only options for such non-coders were template sites and online site generators.

The problem with templates is they require coding skills to customise them to specific business needs, so they're only really a shortcut. Their designs tend to look dated, often poor and table-based. Online site generators on the other hand, catch you with a double-whammy of limited functionality while tying you to the host that provides the service. Thankfully, though, the emergence of open-source Content Management Systems (CMS) has provided a third choice.

A CMS is a framework into which you can pour your content, onto which it will impose a navigational structure, page formatting and an admin interface for adding and editing text and pictures. CMSes are relatively simple to set up, can be "skinned" with thousands of customisable themes, and they support plugins that extend their capabilities. Whether a CMS is the right choice for you will depend on the purpose of your website: if your site is largely based on static content a CMS might be ideal, but if you're developing a web application with a very specific function you may be better off having the site custom-written (you can reprogram a CMS so that it works exactly as you wish, but there comes a point when it isn't worth whittling a square peg CMS to fit your round-hole web application). For example, if most of your business is e-commerce then a CMS might not be the right choice, but if e-commerce forms only a small part of your site and the remainder is content, you could employ a CMS with a plugin that integrates it with your payment provider.

Let's say you run a driving school and want a website to promote it. This site will contain information about your track record, services and prices, and you want people to get in touch with you and maybe register to qualify for discounts. You also want to earn a few quid by selling driving-related books and CDs through the Amazon Associates programme. You could hire a web designer to create a site, and in some cases this would be a good choice, but for a one-person driving school struggling to survive the credit crunch it may be overkill, and as a result lots of small businesses still don't have websites. I won't claim that any website is better than none, as I've seen too many PowerPointed horror shows, but I do believe that a CMS-based site offers the best way out of this dilemma. At the very least it can drastically cut the cost of taking your business online.