Do you design your own web pages?

[zebra]

For those of you who have your own web sites, something you've designed, esp., if for work -- do you do it yourself? Would you consider paying someone else, esp. if you're a WAHM? How much would you pay to have ongoing access or for each time you wanted to change something on your web pages? Would you feel happy paying £100 up front, and £20/month thereafter? If not, what seems like a reasonable charge to you?

DH is trying to get a company going... this is my first crude effort at market research. Since Mumsnet is the fount of all wisdom...(!) At least, you gals always tell it like it is....

Sorry, not sure whether you meant your dh was thinking of designing web pages or looking for someone to design his web page...

I do it myself. There are some great packages out there - Front Page is ok for basic sites or you can go all funky with Dreamweaver. I code basic pages in html alone. There are lots of free packages on the net too.

If you are selling from a site you will have to learn how to use database and shopping software. Also its good to have Photoshop or some such to reduce images down to jpegs. IME, optimising the pics takes the most amount of time and this is something you should factor in when charging.

I would only charge clients a monthly fee if it was a site that changed very frequently. Most simple sites can sit quite happily for a few months and not be changed.

The other thing worth thinking about is how you will get clients pages to register 'high up' on search engines. It can be difficult to do this and worth spending time and energy on - clients aren't very happy if their site doesn't show up on the first page of Google for example.

Hope this has made sense...

Whether you pay someone else to design and maintain your site really depends on what it's for. I'd say if it's for a business, look at it the same way you'd look at business cards - would you design them yourself or get a professional to do it?

If you do it yourself, you'll need to learn how to use something like FrontPage or Dreamweaver to produce the HTML. You can download an evaluation copy of Dreamweaver from www.macromedia.com and have a play around with it. You can do a lot without knowing how to write HTML, but eventually you will need to venture into the code which may look a bit scary at first but actually it is pretty simple to learn with the aid of a book. If the site is going to contain more than just text, you'll also need software to produce and manipulate images. I use Fireworks (another Macromedia product), but there are lots of graphics packages out there (Photoshop, Paintshop Pro etc etc).

If you're not so hot on design, you can buy ready made templates on the web into which you can slot your content. Some of them are quite good (www.projectseven.com has some very cool ones). I believe FrontPage comes with themed templates built in.

If you have the time, there's no reason why you can't do it yourself. If not, it would be best to get a professional to do it for you. You could pay a pro to do the design and then maintain it yourself thereafter. For a decent design I'd expect to pay between 200 and 500 quid. You will have to pay for web hosting, unless you use one of the free ones which force you to display adverts on your pages - I don't know how much that would cost precisely, but would guess at around £10 a month, quite possibly less. Your web hosting service gives you FTP access to the web server, which allows you to download and upload files to update the content yourself.

As i said at the beginning, think of it as you would think about stationery and printed publicity for the business. You will get a more professional result if you pay a professional to do it, but if you have the time and a bit of design ability, you could probably do it yourself to save money. It's a false economy though if the end result looks amateurish and puts prospective customers off! If you decide to use a professional, make sure you see examples of their work, and choose someone whose work you really like.

HTH