How Are You Hosting Your Website?

[BrendanLeahy]

I had a programmer create my website a few years ago. Unfortunately, now it seems to be failing, and I can't seem to get ahold of the coder anymore, and none of my friends (or friends of friends) are proficient enough in the coding language to help me resolve it. In all honesty, it's been quite a pain :/

I'm essentially looking to:

• showcase my portfolio
• show a "featured" section
• have a contact form
• have an "about us" section
• be able to upload new videos to Vimeo and have them show up on my website

I know I could be paying for Vimeo's premium service and accomplish a lot of the same things or hosting a site on squarespace, but I just feel those don't feel quite as nice as having your own site.

Anyone have some ideas of where I can look?

Thank you!

 

[Mark Phelan]

My site is woefully out-of-date as well. Used WordPress but it's so bizarre that I had to get some help putting it together. They've gotten better, but I'm not sold on it at all. Weebly is a possibility with their WYSIWYG GUI.

But I would love to hear what others are using and what is working well these days.

 

[Chad Lancaster]

Find a wordpress theme you like on somewhere like themeforest.com and tweak it as needed.

 

[Samir Patel]

I pretty much learned HTML by hacking around early on in highschool. To this day I still work on my own sites and even took the time to learn basic mysql/php to build a real estate backend for my other business. Some time back when everything moved to HTML5 I simply stopped keeping up with the design as I would never today design a site for someone else anyway. My suggestion just signup for some site like Squarespace. That's what I will even do if I need to move past simple HTML code myself. You can't really beat a simple subscription site with multiple templates you can switch between whenever you want.

 

[Adam Alake]

I hired one of my friends to do the basic design and framework for me, then I hosted it on GoDaddy and I update it as I go with my rudimentary web language knowledge.

 

[Brandon Veen]

For those who are design-oriented, who already are paying for Creative Cloud, it seems like Adobe Muse might have made some strides since it's first introduction. I never liked how the code looks however, a lot of junk code in my opinion, so hopefully in that regard it's better now.

Wordpress sucks to learn for creating your own themes, I still haven't done it, but like Chad said, if you find a Wordpress theme you like it could potentially save you a lot of time there, since it'd be easier to update.

As for uploading to Vimeo and the videos showing on your site, the easiest way to do it might be by checking out Vimeo's widgets here. This might not be able to fit your needs though.

Otherwise, if you hire somebody to do it, what you're asking for doesn't seem like too much work. The main thing would be getting Vimeo videos to automatically post to your site. If you base it off your current one, your About Me page would be an easy one to strip down and add different content into.

If you go the route of doing it yourself, I'd download Brackets, make a copy of your site on your computer, and mess around with the code and check out some tutorials to learn enough HTML to make something with it.

 

[Andy White]

Does your current site automatically create a link/tile when you upload a new video to Vimeo, or is that what you're looking to do in any new version?

 

[Mat_G]

Brendan,

IMO......

- "Having your own site"... person on other end looking at your site doesn't care about that!
- What matters is does a DIY web provider make your life easier and give you the ability to present your work the way you want?
- Those recommending Wordpress... For real, who has time to mess with Wordpress? Are you a creator or are you a coder? Creators spend time creating not nerding it up coding stuff
- Millennials & GenZ know what is up. It's a DIY/marketing hack economy. I've seen kids launch companies/brands overnight. Don't overthink the tool/platform. Get your work out there with what make it EASY to do so. Focus on your passion (shooting stuff) not f*ng html nonsense.

Some of my favs: (targeted towards CREATORS)
- www.22slides.com
- www.cargocollective.com
- www.format.com

I love SqSpace, but under the hood the platform is a hot mess.

or just hire somebody, call it a day and get back to shooting.

I had a programmer create my website a few years ago. Unfortunately, now it seems to be failing, and I can't seem to get ahold of the coder anymore, and none of my friends (or friends of friends) are proficient enough in the coding language to help me resolve it. In all honesty, it's been quite a pain :/

I'm essentially looking to:

• showcase my portfolio
• show a "featured" section
• have a contact form
• have an "about us" section
• be able to upload new videos to Vimeo and have them show up on my website

I know I could be paying for Vimeo's premium service and accomplish a lot of the same things or hosting a site on squarespace, but I just feel those don't feel quite as nice as having your own site.

Anyone have some ideas of where I can look?

Thank you!

 

[Sabyasachi Patra]

When I first did my website, I hired a guy who called himself an expert and then just copied some code from the net which was immediately hacked. Then my partner who is a techie took it upon herself to do my site. Find a techie, fix your budget and get the site done.

 

[Dominic Boudreault]

I just use Squarespace. Clean, simple, effective, reliable. Dunked is pretty interesting as well for creatives.

 

[Eren Ozkural]

+1 for Squarespace here. It's so easy to make something clean and beautiful that's responsive on desktop/tablets/mobile. If you want to get fancy with it and inject code, you can do that too. There's inbuilt commerce options, domain names, galleries, video backgrounds, pretty much everything you'd need. Their customer support is brilliant too, I've had to get in touch about 3-4 times over the past ten years. Each time I was able to talk to a real human well within an hour, no matter what time of day/night and my issues were resolved immediately. I only had a night's worth of downtime over the past decade. You can try it out for free for about 2 weeks if I remember correctly. It's a very WYSIWYG way of building a website too. If it sounds like I'm overhyping them, I'm really not. It's so rare to find any kind of service or product that does everything as advertised.

 

[David Peterson]

Don't get locked into someone else's system, such as Squarespace. Then you lose control.

So go for open source WordPress!