I need to get a website up and running to start my business, does anyone know of any easy to use sites to do this, i need a website that i can maintain and accept payments, i have thought of advertising for a student in this field but do not know where to start.

There have been a few who have done it with little or no experience. Mrs Jackaroo for one. http://www.ukshoppingworldwide.com/ Either pm her or await further instruction from someone else.

Good luck with the business.

Try www.mdwebhosting.com.au They are pretty decently priced and hava a webpage builder included with their packages (you just need to email them to set it up once you have registered and got your login details)

Their servers are pretty good too, I've never had my sites offline due to them having a problem (unlike another company I used to use that was down more than it was up )

You can get OScommerce for free but there will be a little learning curve.

If you get a host like say webcity then they have an administrators front end called cpanel which lets you easily add things like oscommerce or forums or whatever, then its a case of setting up the site but the oscommerce forums have loads of info.

There are others also but that seems to be the most common.

There is also paid for software like actinic which is great for commerce websites and quite easy to work out but still has lots of bugs in the software. Many developers will use things like Actinic to set up your website and charge you for the privilege.

I suggest you get the free trial and check out if its easy enough for you to do but you'll need to select your host carefully to make sure they allow the scripts in software such as this.

If you start trying to learn how to code a website in something like dreamweaver then imho it is too long a learning curve especially when you have all the other aspects in your business to think about.

I've heard of people using http://www.mrsite.co.uk but mostly in the UK. It lets you develop your own site and can have a shopping cart etc

You can buy it online so it is delivered via e-mail instead of post.

AL

I'd recommend a company called Inhale Technologies (www.inhale.com.au). They specialise in this sort of stuff and do not charge too much.

A professional looking website is important if you are selling stuff (rather than just having a presence) and I wouldn't be doing it myself.

you could always go on www.getacoder.com

We outsource some of our coding to a few guys on there.

Personally, im a dreamweaver man.

Albeit we use about 3 or 4 diff packages.

1st off buy a domain, aussie domains, try www.domaincentral.com.au
2nd find a host. If your looking at purely the aussie market, then get a company with aussie servers, this is harder than it sounds. As a lot of them, use american datacentres.
A good bet is www.tpinternet.com or look under google for TwoPlums
3rd if you wanna sell over encrypted connection you will need a https secure connection.
4th most sites use Fantastico ( server side ) and you should be able to use, some of the built in free php and mysql stuff in Cpanel.

5th when all set up and running, get yourselfd listed on http://www.dmoz.org/ the open directory project, the power behind google well sorta

As a beginner you will need:

well my personal recommendations.

Editplus
Smartfty ( or cuteftp )
Adobe Photoshop

anything you create ( html and htm etc pages ) can be viewed in internet explorer locally before you upload to the internet, php works slightly differently.

http://www.download.com/3120-20_4-0....blish&tag=srch

I've been using Mr Site for about 3 years, very simple to use and you can get a .com address instead of a .co.uk iif you prefer that

I have just had a website built, we too accept payments online via paypal. Jason, the guy we dealt with also fully understands the way google rates websites and in less than 2 months we are number one in google for accommodation on the mornington peninsula (accommodation is one of the hardest catagories to crack).

Have a look at my website and you will find the link to Jaydean Business Services at the bottom of my home page

Good Luck, Andy

I've tried a few, but I really like this one.....

http://www.lmsoft.com/english/mainmenu.html

.... web creator 4 pro, it's pretty simple with minimal or no html knowledge. Here is our website that we built with it, have fun!

http://www.breezephotos.com.au

Was this very expensive? We are looking for a non payment taking website to launch a Pony Stud over here. Drove through Tyabb today, very nice tack shop!

You should be able to get a simple 'brochure' site of four or five pages for about $300 including domain name registration and server space.

Our website is rather complex because of what it is able to do, having said that we believe it was money well spent. Feel free to give us a ring or call in if you are near to Tyabb or just ring Jason

Andy

Really? I've no idea how long it takes to do a website, but say it takes 1 hour per page. Who's going to do anything decent for $300 for 4 or 5 pages?

Brochure sites are incredibly easy to put together. The missus and I have been in the web business since 1992 and have made more than a few - back in the days of Scoot in the UK, we were producing about 6 sites a day on our own. They weren't things of beauty or great design - but they don't need to be, they're the online equivalent of a flyer in the newsagents window.

Generally speaking you simply repurpose existing artwork - a brochure, an advert or whatever. They usually require nothing but CSS and HTML code. The fact that some companies charge businesses thousands of dollars for such sites is indicative of the fact that the web design business still have a lot of growing up to do. Of course if the business wants bells and whistles - a database driven site, some sort of custom scripting, SEO work or whatever, then the fee rises, but for simple business card sites, $300 is entirely reasonable. I could make a good one in an hour flat and $300 an hour is not a bad pay rate.