Which website/domain hosts for the following, please?

[Blodwengoch]

Have also posted this in freelancing topic....

I'm starting up a portfolio business, freelancing in my former capacity, but also training as a fitness instructor.

I'm confident I can build my own website with one of the off-the-shelf options, and need the tools to do the following – I'd be grateful for any suggestions of who to go with:

• Responsive design, so that it works on desktop, tablet and mobile
• the ability to take bookings and payments (potentially via PayPal or similar)
• to post my blog
• 2 email addresses and 2 URLs (one of each for my 'suit-wearing' work, and the other for the fitness element of my role).

Thank you for any advice.

[cdtaylornats]

I have always found 1&1 to be excellent.

[prh47bridge]

A lot depends on how much traffic you are expecting. I run websites for a few organisations using servers rented from Kimsufi. I go for them because they give a dedicated server (so I'm not sharing with other websites) with plenty of space at a reasonable cost - as the websites have large numbers of images and see quite a lot of traffic we need the space. However, for a low traffic, relatively small site I would regard a dedicated server as over the top and would go for something cheaper.

In terms of building the website, I would look at Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress along with anything your chosen webhost provides. All three are free. Wordpress works well for small to medium sized websites, blogs and smaller ecommerce sites. It is very easy to use so is often chosen by beginners. Joomla is more powerful and is particularly good for social networking and ecommerce sites but requires a bit more technical understanding. Drupal is the most powerful but also the most difficult to use. The advantage of using Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress over your webhost's system is that you will be able to migrate the website to a different webhost relatively easily should you need to do that in future, whereas if you use your webhost's system you may have to rebuild the site from scratch.

[Blodwengoch]

Thank you so much! Very useful, clear info, I'll look into all those ideas.

[Blodwengoch]

Prh - when you say Joomla requires more technical understanding, what do you mean by that? Would I need to code, for example? I have a very rudimentary knowledge of html, and have designed sites in the past, but more on the content than tech side.

Thanks again.

[prh47bridge]

I use Joomla for my websites.

You shouldn't need to code. The only coding I've every done is when I wanted something that was very non-standard.

Some knowledge of html is useful but not essential. Occasionally I find the "what you see is what you get" editor isn't doing quite what I want so I switch to editing the html. If you find a template that meets your needs (there are loads available, both free and for a small fee) you shouldn't need anything else. I've tweaked my sites to look a little different from the standard for the templates I'm using. If you want to do that some css knowledge is useful.

If you go for Joomla you will need to find and install a template that gives the look and feel you want. You will also want to install some add-ons to give you additional functionality, e.g. the ability to sell things using Paypal. Once you've done that and understood the basic concepts it should be straightforward.

If you go to demo.joomla.org/, scroll down and click on the "Launch Test Drive" button it takes you to the administration pages of a demo installation with a basic website. You can make modifications to the website and see the results instantly. That will give you a feel for Joomla and help you figure out whether or not to use it.

[Blodwengoch]

Thank you again - I'll go ahead and do that.