
Ask HN: As a busy founder, how to address a website best? - neltnerb
I&#x27;m a single founder of a high-tech (but not web-based) company. However, I don&#x27;t really have the thousands of dollars it would take to get a website designer to put together a site for me.<p>I absolutely respect that it&#x27;s worth the money, the money just doesn&#x27;t exist. So, I need to find a stopgap so that my company has <i>something</i> out on the web which makes us look professional enough that when I reach out to customers we don&#x27;t look like total amateurs.<p>Can anyone help me navigate this mild morass? Should I just use Bootstrap and get something minimal up? Or is there some other solution that takes a little more time but would look a lot better?<p>What I&#x27;m trying to find is whatever will get me to a site that, not including creating the content, will take me less than 10 hours to get to a clean and modern state for someone who has used Linux exclusively for over a decade, and knows basic programming, but is busy enough to want to really just follow a tutorial (that actually works).<p>I don&#x27;t care about things like the new trend of scrolling graphics windows or whatever that sin of nature is, or probably most other modern features. I&#x27;m looking to make a site closer to DuPont in style than a web startup. The one thing that would be a really &quot;nice to have&quot; is a news feed that I can update via the web to keep the content updated more often.
======
soneca
Find a suitable free template here: [http://startbootstrap.com/template-
categories/all/](http://startbootstrap.com/template-categories/all/)

Find some suitable stock photo here:
[http://www.imcreator.com/free](http://www.imcreator.com/free)

Upload it here: [https://pages.github.com](https://pages.github.com)

Professional looking website in a couple of hours.

~~~
neltnerb
Oh, thank god. These look great. This one looks amazing:

[http://themeforest.net/item/enfold-responsive-
multipurpose-t...](http://themeforest.net/item/enfold-responsive-multipurpose-
theme/4519990?WT.ac=search_item&WT.oss_phrase=business&WT.oss_rank=2&WT.z_author=Kriesi)

is this kind of drag and drop page layout common nowadays? I feel like I'm
going to have to buy you all a beer.

I've got my own webserver, so my inclination is to try to install it there
because it's there... it sounds like it might be much more sane to host it
elsewhere though? Is there a benefit to something like "webfaction" as
suggested elsewhere versus the github hosting? I'd never heard of github
hosting websites before, but I definitely trust the brand and definitely like
the idea of versioned website updates.

~~~
pc86
Just keep in mind that while themes from ThemeForest (and similar
marketplaces) look great, they are usually a disaster from a code perspective.
These should be seen as a temporary measure, and one that will be largely
discarded when you have the funds to dedicate to a better site.

Source: I've made quite a bit of money fixing ThemeForest themes when the
business outgrows them.

~~~
neltnerb
Thanks for the heads up!

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lauriswtf
Have you seen Squarespace[0]? It is one of the quickest ways to launch a
website. It even lets you register a domain, so it is all-inclusive.

[0] - [http://www.squarespace.com/](http://www.squarespace.com/)

~~~
gemmakbarlow
+1 for Squarespace - clean & easy to get up and running. Tutorials and 24/7
support.

------
Jsarokin
I'd say your best bet is to check out some of the high quality themes at
[http://themeforest.net](http://themeforest.net) \-- if you don't want to deal
with html / css the wordpress themes are really easy to setup and look
amazing.

~~~
neltnerb
Thanks so much for the advice! My primary concern with Wordpress is that it
has been around long enough that it could actually be harder to set up because
of out of date tutorials, and that I've been told it's got a lot of security
issues. I also have a vague horrible memory of trying to install it in 2006 or
2007 and it being a disaster to customize... but I don't want to hold that
against it in 2014. On the other hand, I've been told that because it's a
blogging platform (is it really?) it's easier to update content through the
web interface, and that makes it get higher rankings on Google (for now).

I don't know enough to evaluate any of these claims or worries; do you think
that they're still true? I certainly absolutely positively have no problem
paying for a high quality theme, I'm much more worried about creating a mess
on my server that will take dozens of hours of attention to clean up.

~~~
mashmac2
These days, Wordpress is quite secure for most uses - especially a simple
corporate site. Here's how I'd go about it-

1\. Buy theme from themeforest or similar. 2\. Buy a shared hosting account
from webfaction or similar (less than $10/month) 3\. Use their one-click
Wordpress installer to install Wordpress 4\. Install theme in Wordpress
install.

This keeps it off your server in case of issue, doesn't really cost much at
all, and offers some great hosting support if you run into issues
([http://docs.webfaction.com/software/wordpress/index.html](http://docs.webfaction.com/software/wordpress/index.html))
that's current.

~~~
raverbashing
Exactly this

Don't sweat it. And webfaction (or other shared host) allows you to run
something else if you need it, like a simple PHP (or something else) app

------
rcarrigan87
A lot of founders who have businesses that aren't reliant on the internet dump
money on a really nice website thinking it'll be a great marketing tool. Then
they end up disappointed when their website isn't generating any leads.

The web is so competitive nowadays, simply having a site (even if it looks
great) won't do you any good.

10-20% of a budget should be spent on web design and 80-90% on actually
marketing the website. So if you have a 5K budget you should spend around
$500-$1000 on the website and the rest on marketing the website.

If you can't get something built for under 20% then maybe just put up a
facebook or google places page in the interim. A website can be a huge
distraction from time better spent going out and getting customers.

Also, if you're a designer doing basic business websites, keep in mind on-page
SEO practices. It really bothers me when designers completely disregard search
engines and do their clients a huge disservice. Designers who can talk about
basic SEO principles have a huge leg up. At the end of the day, a business
owner is only really interested in more business.

 __I 'm not suggesting this is the OP, but a common mistake I see amongst
founders __

~~~
robotpony
It's a common mistake for medium and large companies too. Most budgets are
poured into design and development, which encourages adding requirements, more
design, etc., not leaving anything for ongoing content development and
marketing. The result is a site with more pages than it needs and pages that
are all boilerplate, puff, and sparsely related to pushing the purpose. The
effort is distracting and mostly futile, especially lacking marketing time and
effort.

If I can make a recommendation, the only pages that should be added to the web
are those that make the it better. Are you a web services company? Expose your
service as part of your site (Github does this by providing a Google-
searchable central hub of OSS projects). Are you a non-profit? Obsess over
getting people involved instead of spreading your message: adding people
builds up your voice, spreading your message spreads you thinner (and adding
people spreads your message with less effort). SEO is best played as adding,
building, and providing useful things (or collaborations). And the best
improvements in search rankings is had by providing useful things for people
to reference (the Github example again). If you're not providing something to
link to, preferably a never ending stream of awesomeness, SEO and other
marketing become difficult.

I've been part of many very wasteful website projects, with dozens of about
pages, blog listings, categories, and other nonsense that on their own do not
make something worth investing in. Put up as little as you can, make it
useful, and focus on marketing what you do to people with the rest of your $.

------
deedubaya
Don't waste time trying to build/theme a website yourself. You should be
focusing on building your business.

$10/month [http://www.simplybuilt.com](http://www.simplybuilt.com)

------
saluki
Like others have said just go with a themeforest theme, if you or someone else
in your company knows html/css they can take an html theme and have your
website up and running in an afternoon.

I'm not a fan of wordpress unless you're going to be blogging posting articles
on a regular basis.

WP is fast and easy to setup from scratch on hostgator or any web host . . .
it will probably take longer to get the site setup vs. an html version . . .
but it will be easier to edit/post articles.

hostgator is good shared hosting . . . to get setup fast and inexpensively . .
.

Good luck with your new website.

------
dbla
If you're looking for something a little bit more custom than a pre-built
theme, my start-up has been experimenting with offering a custom designed
theme for $200. We'll set up a phone call to go over your needs and design
preference and then put something together for you and give you free hosting
on our platform. The catch is that you allow us to open source the template so
that your customers can use/tweak it in the future and that you use your
hosting platform and give us good and honest feedback. We've done this once
before and it turned out well. This was the end result:
[http://www.365startupgirl.com](http://www.365startupgirl.com)

Our designer is really talented and a pleasure to work with.

If you're interested feel free to hit me up. My email is in my profile.

EDIT: We also have a couple free bootstrap themes on our blog
[http://900dpi.com/blog](http://900dpi.com/blog)

------
madoublet
I am building a product called Triangulate
([http://triangulate.io](http://triangulate.io)) that would work for you. It
is an open-source site builder (or CMS) built in AngularJS. I provide a hosted
service, plus, the app is completely open source so it can grow with your
business.

~~~
ConnorRoberts
If you didn't know, the "Get Started" button is broken on (some?) mobiles :)

[http://i.imgur.com/4GUVVcT.png](http://i.imgur.com/4GUVVcT.png) (HTC One M7,
Chrome)

~~~
madoublet
Thanks! Should be fixed now.

------
Everhusk
I would recommend checking out www.weebly.com. It is a drag and drop website
builder which I think would meet all of your requirements. You could easily
have your website up and running in 1-2 hours with a nice design, and the
costs are very reasonable (~$4/mo with hosting included). Best of luck!

------
mrben
Not used it myself but I've seen a few nice sites around that are built with
[https://www.strikingly.com/](https://www.strikingly.com/).

Downside is you're not hosting it yourself.

Upside is you're not hosting it yourself.

------
brudgers
Creating a website for a business that isn't a website isn't work. It's
attractive because it looks like work and is so much easier than the real
thing.

In most of the world's businesses customers don't give a shit about your
website. They care about your product. And if the business isn't generating
enough revenue to build a website, that's a sign that either the product isn't
viable or more productive channels for finding the first few customers aren't
being adequately exploited.

If sales are occurring but they don't support hiring out a website, then the
pricing model is wrong.

Good luck.

------
sk55
[https://wrapbootstrap.com/](https://wrapbootstrap.com/) is a quick way to
make whatever you made in bootstrap look nice

------
dimitar
If you are that busy, please don't create a Wordpress site with plugins and
themes. They are hacked very often - the extensions, php and wordpress itself
are vulnerable and have to be updated often to stay safe.

Make a simple static website, maybe even a site-builder like wix. Backup your
content (the text and pictures) and don't rely too much on trendy graphics -
they'll go out of fashion in 2 years anyway.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I used to have a static website, before I wised up and moved to Wordpress like
everyone else.

I found that, once I restricted myself to the features of static pages, the
security risks of Wordpress were a lot less scary:

\- You can't hack form submissions if the site doesn't have any forms on it.

\- If you're going to require SSH to publish new pages, you can require SSH
tunnels to log in to Wordpress or access any admin pages. (I should write up
my nginx config for this.)

\- If you were prepared to make every site update require a Git push, you can
surely afford to disable WP's very scary self-update-in-place feature and
perform WP updates from a development server instead.

\- A WP site that could be usefully replaced by a static site is vulnerable...
how, exactly? Static sites don't accept credit card numbers. Customers can't
even log in, so they won't type in their darkest secrets even if they wanted
to. Employees can be told to follow rules like "don't use your Gmail password
for the corporate WP site" and "don't type anything into the public publishing
engine that would cause an emergency if it were published to the public."

The biggest risk is denial-of-service and defacement. Restore from your
tamper-proof offline backups, which you need to have anyway. There are
probably fifteen different services you could use to be alerted when the
website changes unexpectedly or starts serving up malware.

Of course, static websites are faster. Until you turn on Cloudflare's free
plan, which makes everything faster still.

------
mikeman
Would you consider someone to help build your website? If we're talking about
a 10 hour project, maybe you're being quoted wrongly or there is some
unclarity. Would you like to talk about the details? I make sites with
Themeforest themes for small companies. Maybe there are a few options to
explore. [http://webodew.com](http://webodew.com). I'm Mike

------
namuol
Try [http://webflow.com](http://webflow.com) \- it hits the sweet spot of
"sensible defaults" while still giving you enough control.

I recently built a launch page with it ([http://gitsub.io](http://gitsub.io)).

I'm used to doing sites "from scratch" but I have to admit the immediate
feedback the webflow editor gives you is a huge win.

------
simi_
Since everyone is recommending random stuff, I've been impressed by these
guys: [http://yootheme.com/](http://yootheme.com/). They even have a great
open source CMS (albeit written in PHP):
[http://www.pagekit.com/](http://www.pagekit.com/).

------
neltnerb
Anyone have experience with the providers Wordpress lists as their recommended
hosting services?

[https://wordpress.org/hosting/](https://wordpress.org/hosting/)

Wordpress.com itself looks maybe a bit restrictive in theming, although that
can be a good thing too of course.

~~~
samsnelling
I 1000% endorse Cloudways. It allows you to spin up a _managed_ high
performance Wordpress Stack in minutes on DigitalOcean or AWS.

For most small businesses, I'd say a 1GB or 2GB server should be fine, so $15
or $30 per month.

I only host my clients on Cloudways, just because it takes so much hassle out
of the situation, and is much cheaper than using something like a Flywheel or
a WPEngine.

Edit: Cloudways sets up Varnish, Nginx, Apache, Memcache. I then manually set
up a CDN (MaxCDN being my preference), and use CloudFlare for DNS. I usually
use NYC DigitalOcean. Love the speed. Oh, and Cloudways has patched (for
ShellShock) all of my clients servers for me :)

------
graycat
Your ISP might have something simple where you could just fill in some blanks.

A lot of companies, including some VC firms, have just gone to Facebook and
used it.

Could try any of the blog hosting means.

Probably don't want to run your own computer and, thus, if it is running Linux
or not will be irrelevant at your level.

------
chrisgoman
Just use [http://wiz.com](http://wiz.com) or
[http://squarespace.com](http://squarespace.com) and call it a day

------
porter
29doors.com - they will setup a semi-custom WordPress site for under $500 that
you'll own. Mention this comment and you'll get a discount.

------
moron4hire
If you don't have the $1k to pay a designer, do you have money to host the
site?

~~~
neltnerb
The designers I've talked to (and trust) generally see $1k as an amount they'd
want to set up a very basic customized website. Much beyond that seems to come
in more like a $5k-$10k range.

I'm sure I could outsource to the internet and get a better "deal", but that
makes me very uncomfortable. I know that's not always rational, but basically
I trust myself to put in whatever time it takes to make it meet my needs, so
long as the tools are available.

------
manas_a
Checkout Handyland.in should be able to help out.

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gamebit07
Let me know, I can be of help. username at gmail.

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falsestprophet
DNS is the best way to address a website. It translates human-friendly
computer hostnames into IP addresses.

