General Advice on building and maintaining small website ?

[miasma man]

Hi,

I've not used this part of the forum before but it looks like it could be quite useful.

We need to create a half decent web site that can easily be maintained for regular uploads.

We have a current web site that I created at:

http://www.axiomusic.com

A very simple site with a few of our old tracks.

However, we need a new upgraded professional looking site with several pages to include new audio tracks, artist bio, tracks signed, future, links, etc

I've got all the ideas of how I want it to look, even got the final graphics (or will have when I've finished them) so then its just creating pages, adding text and links etc, to the background. I do want some intro animation if possible with a track player playing music in the background - option of 3/4 tracks etc.

However, time is something I don't have a lot of.

Ideally, I would do it all myself but I reckon it would take me ages to learn how to do things properly or to the standard we require.

Is it worth considering using a specialist company who can create us a good web page from scratch?

I do have a copy of Dreamweaver - is it worth learning how to utilise this software to get our new web site ?

Or can I create the images, etc we want to use and go to a specialist company and work with them with our images, ideas, audio etc. to get a good web site.

Does anybody know of approximate costs of getting a decent web site as described above done by a specialist company ?

Any advice would be appreciated ?

Cheers,

MM.

[Barely Human]

Ok, Firstly, how much do you know about web design already?? To get a site built by a profesional isnt cheap. Best way is to get someone you know, either online, or a freind to build it for you as it is gonna be a lot cheaper. For a profesional site you are looking anywhere from £30 an hour or £70 a page and upwards to build your site. The easiest way would be to build it yourself. Its not too hard to do a simple site that looks good if you do it the right way. If your half decent with the graphic design, then then making a simple static site wouldnt take too long. I would build how your page will look in photoshop, then chop this picture into bits, leaving a nice blank area for an inline frame. Then all you have to do to update your site is to change the inline frame. For the intro and the mp3 player, that is a bit harder. Delving into the realms of flash design takes a lot of time and patience.

Let me know what you wanna do, and i'll point you in the right direction mate....

[MangaFish]

If your half decent with the graphic design, then then making a simple static site wouldnt take too long. I would build how your page will look in photoshop, then chop this picture into bits, leaving a nice blank area for an inline frame. Then all you have to do to update your site is to change the inline frame. For the intro and the mp3 player, that is a bit harder. Delving into the realms of flash design takes a lot of time and patience.


personally i think thats a horrible way of going about it. it would make the site slow and clumsy.

your better off using something like dreamweaver as its simple enough to use yet doesnt tend to write bulky un-nessisarry HTML code (like frontpage does)

agreed with IQ on the getting a mate to help you out. i dont mind helping but i already have several semi-professional websites on the go so my time is a little devided already

[schlongfingers]

In short I'd say you'd be looking at £400 - £700 excluding hosting.

[MangaFish]

hosting is dirt cheep these days

[MangaFish]

hosting is dirt cheep these days

ment to add: i use www.m6.net for messing about with. its only an NT server but it does have PHP support (amongst other stuff)

[azerom04]

www.coffeecup.com do software which will allow you to do simple flash animation. I think you get a 30 day trail period on their sofware.