Quote:
Originally Posted by Adz
So what I would like to know is what is the normal sort of costs for having someone build a website? Is it worth having them host/maintain? (Would only be things like updating photo galleries etc)
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If you're going to have something like a photo gallery on your website your best bet is to get the web developer to create an admin area for you where you can manage this content.
They don't necessarily need to use a complete content management system (CMS) like Joomla or Drupal.
The easiest way is if you can provide all the copy (text on the site) upfront and the designer can incorporate that into your pages, and let the designer know what sort of imagery you'll be having on your gallery. From the example images the designer can figure out what aspect ratio to use etc.
Biggest tip is to stay away from flash as much as possible, iPads and iPhones have a fairly large market share depending on your target audience and its really bad for
SEO.
For any sort of gallery I'd recommend jQuery tools scrollable:
jQuery Scrollable @ jQuery Tools - Scroll your HTML with eye candy
I used this on a freelance client's website recently:
TOMASZ MACHNIK
All of the images in the above link come from an admin area where a file can be uploaded, along with its title and the order in which it appears in.
Let me know if you need some help.
cheers
* edit *
Don't have your website hosted by the person who made the website for you. If you have a bad experience with them you can't easily 'escape' them by moving on to someone else as the new developer will most likely have to migrate everything across to somewhere else. Get the web developer to point out a good webhost to you and you setup the hosting account yourself, so you can easily change the passwords etc if need be.
To host email for your domain name use google apps, its free and very easy to setup.
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html
With google apps you get gmail, google docs, google calendar which are all extremely useful things. If you have an android phone it all seamlessly integrates with your phone. iPhones also have apps available for google apps. (
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/mobile.html)
This also means you don't have to migrate your mail across when you switch webhosts.