Robbo25

Anyone know any good quality and realistically priced website designers? I am after an e-commerce site with a content management system that I can use. Also I want to choose where the site is hosted and not pay a designer an ongoing charge for hosting where they want just 'cos they earn an income from it.

turkeys

I use Weebly http://weebly.com for a couple of my sites

elephantsfeet

elearning

It is updated regularly with new features and the support is good. I have the pro version which is a small annual charge. It includes Paypal and Google Checkout for eCommerce, supports Google Adsense and has a few online store features.

As for design, it is all based on templates so you can do it all yourself, assuming you don't want something completely original, so there are no developer costs.

You can register your own domain with it or go for one of theirs.

Alternatively you can try Wordpress but I prefer Weebly as it is much easier out of the box for someone less technical like myself.

Am Loolah

I don't know the technicalities of what you're after, but we had this guy do our site and have been really happy.

thedtb

I used this http://www.vpasp.com/ when I put this: www.sharp-parts.co.uk site together for a client of mine.

In terms of hosting, you should try to balance the cost against the expected amount of visitors... the cheap en-mass hosting providers in my experience tend not to cope too well with websites of any real scale... you also need to consider that the cheaper hosting providers often only provide email (or premium-rate telephone) support which can at best be massively frustrating and at worst very expensive (through lost sales as much as support costs) when things go wrong... and they will!

Personally, I host my servers with a small but very reliable ISP in the UK with whom I have history going back almost 10 years (I used to work for them)... when things do go wrong I can pick up the phone and speak to one of their support team within minutes and on almost every single occassion any issues I have, are dealt with extremely quickly!

Sure they're more expensive than the en-mass providers, but given that I host a number of my own sites with them and also a number of my client's sites with them, the advantage in terms of support is priceless!

Regretfully I don't have the time to be able to offer to create a site for you, but if you want to bounce any ideas off me I'll gladly assist/advise if I can... also if you want to detail your hosting requirements to me (assuming you know them), I'll happily quote you for hosting the site for you too.

Regards.

GonetoNZ

Hi Robbo25,

I have a fully functioning E-commerce site that I am selling. It was designed and built in Guernsey, UK and the firm that built it are currently still hosting it and they would probably be able to quote you for any design changes that you need.

I wound the business up when I left the UK last year but the site is still up to see.

The site has a payment gateway facility for credit cards etc and also Paypal. Apart from the front page, pretty much all the info can be changed by the user ie: product pictures, product description, prices etc etc.

I have it advertised for sale back at home in Guernsey for £2,000.
Drop me a PM if you would like further info.

ex geordie

Hi Not sure where you live but we are in Papamoa and we show people how to build wordpress.org sites.We have a 2 day event coming up in Auckland where we show you everything you need to start online should have more details available next week just getting the venue and stuff sorted but heres our local site for now http://topinternettraining.co.nz

Biddy

Thanks Turkeys - my wife and I have just started a new business importing books from the UK and US - and i rustled up a very basic website using Weebly in a couple of hours!! It's only got a couple of pages as yet - but it's a start

Good bloke Karma on its way.

www.romawibooks.com/index.html

turkeys

No worries Biddy, Should be a healthy market here for affordable books, the prices for new books are a swizz. Good luck with it
You might want to put Google Analytics on it too, it'll give you dates and details of locations of visitors to your site

Tranmere Rover

Have a look at DotNetNuke - http://www.dotnetnuke.com

This is a fully-featured portal application and it's FREE!! There are loads of hosting companies here in NZ that host DNN applications (Google is your friend here, but I used one called OpenHost a few years ago and they were Ok). There are also loads of free modules you can download and use with it and plenty of developers/skin designers who can help you extend it on the cheap.

I should probably declare an interest - I worked on the development of DNN when I was at Microsoft a few years ago, but I worked on version 2.0 and it's safely up to something like 5.0 now, so you probably won't come into contact with any of my code.

Feel free to PM me if you have any questions about it though! Good luck!