What's a good low maintenance website solution?
November 10, 2011 9:38 AM Subscribe
How do I best go about providing a low-maintenance-user-friendly-but-update-able website for my boss's business?
My boss runs a financial planning business, and he'd like a website that he'd be able to update and expand with new content (ie adding new articles) in a user-friendly way. I'd also like if the site can be kept updated and running properly without much maintenance (ie no one has to update Wordpress every month).
Is a turnkey solution good for this, and if so, what options should I consider? Or should we hire a web designer? How does one go about hiring a good web designer? Or what about things like Wordpress or Drupal themes? Are there hosts that install security updates automatically?
The website won't sell products or services, which a lot of turnkey solutions tend to be about.
The website should basically be a description of the business, along with articles explaining the basic concepts of financial planning and how a financial planner can help. (My boss said he'd prefer to write some of the content himself, and get some of the other articles premade from a service)
My background: I know some basic HTML, CSS and Javascript, but I don't feel like I have the design chops or experience to build a website myself, nor do I think I could build a website that would have the low maintenance of a turnkey website for either ease of updating content or security, as far as I know.
My boss runs a financial planning business, and he'd like a website that he'd be able to update and expand with new content (ie adding new articles) in a user-friendly way. I'd also like if the site can be kept updated and running properly without much maintenance (ie no one has to update Wordpress every month).
Is a turnkey solution good for this, and if so, what options should I consider? Or should we hire a web designer? How does one go about hiring a good web designer? Or what about things like Wordpress or Drupal themes? Are there hosts that install security updates automatically?
The website won't sell products or services, which a lot of turnkey solutions tend to be about.
The website should basically be a description of the business, along with articles explaining the basic concepts of financial planning and how a financial planner can help. (My boss said he'd prefer to write some of the content himself, and get some of the other articles premade from a service)
My background: I know some basic HTML, CSS and Javascript, but I don't feel like I have the design chops or experience to build a website myself, nor do I think I could build a website that would have the low maintenance of a turnkey website for either ease of updating content or security, as far as I know.
Response by poster: Did not know wordpress could update itself. Thanks for the info!
posted by mccarty.tim at 10:26 AM on November 10, 2011
posted by mccarty.tim at 10:26 AM on November 10, 2011
Response by poster: Any recommendations on where to look for themes?
posted by mccarty.tim at 10:30 AM on November 10, 2011
posted by mccarty.tim at 10:30 AM on November 10, 2011
I'm using Weebly for my little site at work - it's surprisingly flexible and has tons of themes to choose from.
posted by hms71 at 1:08 PM on November 10, 2011
posted by hms71 at 1:08 PM on November 10, 2011
mccarty.tim: "The website won't sell products or services, which a lot of turnkey solutions tend to be about"
The end goal is to get new customers and retain existing ones right? You're selling a service, or at least advertising it. You want to set up a system to measure your effectiveness. I use Google Analytics and it might help you out by tracking conversions. It's easy to set up and collect data, and you can report / analyze later when you have time. There's a WordPress plugin that probably does the bulk of what you want.
if you're really paranoid about security, it sounds like wget --recursive would be sufficient.
mccarty.tim: "Any recommendations on where to look for themes"
The only safe place to go is Wordpress.org.
posted by pwnguin at 11:47 AM on November 11, 2011
The end goal is to get new customers and retain existing ones right? You're selling a service, or at least advertising it. You want to set up a system to measure your effectiveness. I use Google Analytics and it might help you out by tracking conversions. It's easy to set up and collect data, and you can report / analyze later when you have time. There's a WordPress plugin that probably does the bulk of what you want.
if you're really paranoid about security, it sounds like wget --recursive would be sufficient.
mccarty.tim: "Any recommendations on where to look for themes"
The only safe place to go is Wordpress.org.
posted by pwnguin at 11:47 AM on November 11, 2011
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by DarlingBri at 9:41 AM on November 10, 2011