Website creation and hosting

sydh said:

The website will be to support a garden that we open for charity so I don't want to spend too much for hosting as we already spend too much of our own money on maintenance. I only need a static website that will be for advertising the garden and opening times. There will be no sales or blogging.

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Have you considered a Facebook page? It's easy to make if you already have the gardening content and it costs nothing.

An important consideration is that a website among billions of websites is easily lost as a needle in the world-wide-web haystack, and advertising on Google is expensive.

Your audience appears to be local (not world-wide) and Facebook can be used to attract the local community to your garden (and make charity donations)

You can regularly post your "what's new" on Facebook gardening groups for free > you need to continually entice people to visit your garden. The stream of visitors are in fact a form of on-going 'sales' that you have to make (you can also advertise on Facebook, but that's expensive too)

In short, treat the endeavor willy-nilly as a business that has to gain relevance and stay relevant, good luck

sydh said:

Thanks for everyone's input. I shall probably give Hostinger a try. I just need to find out if I use their builder, will I be able to migrate if required.

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Thanks for reply -- always nice to get response to posts -- In the old days of "Netiquette" and bulletin boards this was always followed -- these days there's so many who just want instant gratification on "Social Media" platforms who not only never acknowledge any help they get but also often abuse people trying to help them.

This Forum fortunately has many of all ages who give up a lot of their spare time in trying to help others --even if we don't always have a 100% successful answer -- usually it at least helps people on be "right quest".

So thanks and I hope "you stick with us".

Cheers
jimbo

Haydon said:

Have you considered a Facebook page? It's easy to make if you already have the gardening content and it costs nothing.

An important consideration is that a website among billions of websites is easily lost as a needle in the world-wide-web haystack, and advertising on Google is expensive.

Your audience appears to be local (not world-wide) and Facebook can be used to attract the local community to your garden (and make charity donations)

You can regularly post your "what's new" on Facebook gardening groups for free > you need to continually entice people to visit your garden. The stream of visitors are in fact a form of on-going 'sales' that you have to make (you can also advertise on Facebook, but that's expensive too)

In short, treat the endeavor willy-nilly as a business that has to gain relevance and stay relevant, good luck

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I have a Facebook page already which brings in people from the local FB groups. It doesn't have the display impact of a website though.

sydh said:

When I contacted them, they reckoned the Plus package was suited to me. Probably trying to increase sales but it worked against them because I am looking elsewhere. It doesn't help that I know zilch about website creation and hosting. Still, it keeps the mind active. I'm a retired Autocad design engineer and I thought my days of learning new software were over

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The only thing I'll add is if you're really looking for a web hosting site, I would think you'd want to try to learn something about website creation. There are all kinds of tutorials/videos online, but at the end of the day, it's going to take a lot of patience and trial and error on your part.

I built my website 23 years ago as I taught myself to use FrontPage. Today that same site is still up, although it has gone several changes over the years. Today, I use a photography website template which is extremely malleable from a company called The Turning Gate. It still requires a bit of know-how, and especially coding, mainly HTML and CSS to depending on how fancy you want to get.

Anyway, here in the U.S. I use Blue Host to host for my web host. The overall cost is $180 a year, but that also includes site protection, privacy, as well as spam protection. Also included is Word Press, though I've not set that up yet.

But yeah, creating a website takes a lot of trial and error. I went through 10 iterations in the first 6 months before settling down on a design. Today, there are lots of templates around to make web design a lot easier, but it still takes some basic know-how.