Topic: website for wifey

[charlie]

My wife is a graphic designer who has been mostly working on wedding invitations lately. She'd like to start doing more work and begin advertising herself, or at least making it easy for people to see what she does.

So she was thinking of creating a website (or actually having one created for her). Here are some relevant points of information:

• Initially it would hold a gallery of example work and some contact information.
• She would like to design the aesthetics of the site and/or be able to tweak it if necessary.
• We'd want somebody else to set up the site since I know nothing about web stuff.
• She'd want her own domain obviously (e.g. www.wifeofcharliedesigns.com), and wouldn't mind an email address depending on whether that's possible/easy/cheap.

And the questions are:

• How should I go about setting this up for her?
• How much would hosting/domain/etc cost?
• How much would asking someone to set up the site cost?
• What are the general possibilities and options for us?

I was just curious what you experts thought. Thanks!

[micah]

domains and hosting are dirt cheap. don't let anyone rip you off.

.com names should cost around $10 (give or take $5) and are sometimes included in the cost of hosting depending on the host.
hosting a site of her size just needs some shared server space.  Heck, if you buy your domain name from godaddy they GIVE you free hosting for a basic site like you're looking to build.

that said, paying someone to develop the site for you could range anywhere from $50 to $1,000 depending on who you go with.  If you "know someone" (like me or Ober) you're probably just talking about the lower end of that (don't let RoD do it).  Marketing and programming firms are going to charge a lot lot lot more.

also, i love the idea for the domain name. LOL

[ober]

I would totally set you up.  Might I suggest a Wordpress backend? 

Also, has your wife done web graphics?  Being a graphics designer and being a WEB graphics designer are 2 entirely different things.  Is she good with Photoshop or Illustrator?  My wife has started designing some sites for me recently: www.nrgreenfest.org, www.windyhillwebs.com (I'm going to launch this as my new site once I get a chance to put a little more polish on the content) and she's built out a bunch of templates that I'm going to sell on a store online.  Maybe your wife and my wife could work out a deal.  Yours could put the art together and mine could rework it into a wordpress template.

We wouldn't charge much at all... and could work those details out offline if you want.  Let me know if you're interested.  And I'd be glad to help you figure out hosting and domains.

And even if you don't go with me or Micah, please talk to us about your ideas.  I don't want to see you get ripped off either.

[charlie]

Sweet. Thanks to both of you for the info. I was definitely thinking of having someone "we know" help out. This is intended to be a low cost start just to get something up she can point to that provides information and gives off a somewhat professional vibe.

The missus is not a web graphics designer, her work is almost entirely print design. But she does have a tiny bit of experience with web stuff from her previous job. (She likes Illustrator best, but she does know Photoshop and InDesign, too.) I don't think it would be too hard for her to come up with the images for her site with a few helpful pointers, but I honestly don't know about more than that.

I'll discuss with her and see where to go from here. Any other thoughts or comments are welcome.

[Mike]

second the wordpress suggestion.

[VBprogrammer]

Both those sites are really nice Ober, I should definitely add design skills to my wishlist for a girl!

[ober]

HAHA... you can always add a design plugin to wife 1.0 after the fact.  My model didn't have that as part of the package when I downloaded it.    Unless you count being artsy and able to paint.