Advice designing a non-ecommerce site

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

A family member has decided to start a small business and I will soon be landed with the job of knocking together a basic non-ecommerce website and wondered if any forum members had recommedations to the most suitable software to use.

I have designed my own Actinic site and therefore have basic html and css knowledge but is limited outside of Actinic. I have a copy of Dreamweaver MX that has had little use and I also have an old Actinic V8 magazine CD.

The site will not be large and is unlikely to change regulary. It will not need to sell products, just provide some information about the service offered with a few nice photos and some contact details initially.

Ideally any software should be free and easy to learn.
I think that Wordpress might be the best option but have not looked at it in detail.


I will also need to recommend and set-up hosting which will ideally be free or very cheap, any suggestions.
The site is unlikely to get large amounts of traffic and wouldn't matter if uptime was not 100%. I might take a look at what free hosting if any is available with their ISP.
The domain name has been registered with 123-reg.

[pinbrook]

yep i'd go with wordpress, its easier to learn than other CMS such as joomla/drupal - it also has the advantage now that you can turn off comments site wide.

It does have to have a database though which might exclude you from free hosting.

you may find cheap/budget hosting with online sitebuilding tools such as site studio

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

Thanks Jo,

Their ISP is Sky broaband and I believe doesn't include any webspace, but I have 250Mb webspace that is currently unused with my ISP PlusNet which includes MySQL and CGI, although I know from past experience PlusNet have a strange set-up with a CGI on a separate server I believe (http://ccgi.username.plus.com).

I will also need to check that I can use the already purchased domain name with the free hosting as she won't want an obscure web URL.

[pinbrook]

i dont think wordpress needs cgi, it needs php and mysql

[Steve G Griggs]

Wordpress

I agree with Wordpress being a good choice, and no it does not need CGI, just PHP and MYSQL.

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

I will give Wordpress a go then, thanks for the help.

[Benjamin Dyer]

Wordpress also gets my vote, go for the hosted wordpress.com option and you can eliminate the hosting worry. I believe you can pay a small sum to get access to the CSS.

If you want to go a little further I would explore Expression Engine.

[Duncan Rounding]

I agree with Wordpress being your simplest option but Expression Engine is my CMS of choice. The EE Core software is free and is very powerful and quite easy to get in to using.

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

Thanks I will take a look at EE also.

[dave_finlayson]

Download EE Core quickly though as it may not be available for much longer!

[Duncan Rounding]

That's right I heard that after EE 2.0 is released it may not be free any more. Do you know when is 2.0 expected to be released Dave?

[dave_finlayson]

RC is going live December 1st apparently, looks good so far!

http://expressionengine.com/blog/ent...icial_ee2_faq/

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

Is EE Core free for only non-commercial sites.

[Duncan Rounding]

https://secure.expressionengine.com/...greement&id=34

PERMITTED USE

* Core License: Users of the Core License may use the Software only on a website engaging in personal, non-commercial, or non-profit activities.

[Cheapprices4u]

in simple terms what "extras" do i get using EE

just uploaded the core version to have a look

can i have an idiots guide why i would prefer it to wordpress thanks