Building a professional company website

Question

Hi fellows,

I want to create a professional website for my company. I'm not a designer. I know some html/css, but I don't have much experience making up advanced pages and layouts.

I'd expect public area, with various articles, and a "customer zone", accessible via username and password, where clients will be able to track their orders and download files. It needs to look very modern. I don't want to use website templates, because they're too simple. I know some Wordpress, but that's mostly for blogs, and anyways you need to find a right theme besides the CMS itself...

Is there any alternative solution, some kind of framework for building such portals? Preferably a system that doesn't require designer skills.

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you can afford to start a company, then you can afford a designer.

Programmers are programmers, designers are designers; usually they do not and should not overlap

Answer 2

I think you need to decide what's important to you. You say you want a professional website, but you also say you don't have the skill sets right now to do it. Would you hire a developer to build your programs if he or she didn't have the right skill set? You'll either get something out that looks 'ok' that you did, or you can pay for someone to make it just the way you want. If you have a "little bit" of skill in HTML/CSS it's going to most likely be a night mare making it look the same on all browsers for you.

If you go ahead anyway, check out drupal, which is very similar to joomla. It also has a lot of plugins readily available, like shopping carts which (i would imagine) have order tracking built into them. That's more functionality though, and you'll still need to come up with your own web identity.

Regardless of what you choose, good luck to you.

Answer 3

Wordpress for sure will fall short for anything else than blogging. I like Drupal, but that is a personal preference. You will have to weight how much complexity you will like to handle. If you are thinking big (shopping, net apps...) you should go for Rails, Django, Zope...

The problem is that the more powerful tool you choose, the harder it will be for you to work on your website and find someone to work for it. If you go for Zope you will not find many people to help you (and the ones you find will be more expensive). If you can afford to cut down on features, go for something easier and popular

Answer 4

i am abit like you, i am better at development but like to do some design too. i like to have the control and ability to have a part in creating something i and others will like, without waiting for others to do it for me

from your profile, i see u are a .NET developer? if so then u may want to use ASP.NET (i would prefer MVC 2, for its separation of concerns). i think the ASP.NET site will be a good starting point, they provide some videos, that will probably help u get started. NerdDinner (an ASP.NET MVC application walkthrough) is probably something that will be good to watch too.

for general HTML/CSS, i suggest

• w3schools for really basic
• NetTuts+
• HTML5 Doctor (if u want to get started on HTML5)
• CSS Tricks
• CSS3.info (if u want to get started on CSS3)

* sorry i removed the links as being a new user, i cant post more than 1 link. i guess its simple enough to search google to get these also, abit more trouble sry

Answer 5

You may want to consider DotnetNuke. It gives you a lot right out of the box and there is a fairly robust market for custom modules and skins.