In the interests of continuing my introduction to the 21st century, I’m going to try and cobble a website together this weekend to showcase some of the joinery/carpentry work I’ve done. As usual, I’m punting this question at the local biker community 
I guess first I need a provider? Any suggestions?
Use some hosting company, they more likely have a good package for decent money (£5-£15 a month depends on services). They provide a various templates which you may update with your text and pictures, pretty much “Lego” like build. They also will take care about domain registration for you and email system.
If you need a hand let me know.
R
Rob, I’m letting you know 
Any particular hosting company? or are they all much the same?
Id like it to have a blog section where I can post pictures and information about ongoing projects, a gallery to put up some of my older work.
All advice appreciated
PM me and I can help you with the website.
let me know what you need and I ll see what I can do
If you need any help feel free to PM me - there are advantages to working in IT 
Hi Mate so there are a couple of options.
If you go to wordpress.com you can get up an running in about 2 hours, their registration includes registering your domain name and mapping it to a site. From there you can use wordpress which is a tool for creating blogs and pages that doesn’t require any code. Working through wordpress.com you can only use the templates supplied (although there are hundreds) you can’t purchase a 3rd party template and use that. This is the simplest way to go as they handle all the hosting. My blog costs about £60 a year. www.jobybyrne.com
The other option is to go to an internet provide heart internet are really good and have excellent customer service. www.heartinternet.co.uk. You can purchase a domain name and hosting from them then map the domain name to the hosting which takes 2 clicks. From there you can either use their website building software or use the 1 click installation of wordpress to install wordpress and use it from there. Using wordpress in that way you can use 3rd party templates.
It’s a bit daunting at first but there is nothing to it really. There are tonnes of videos about using wordpress on youtube and lots of notes in forums. It has it’s quirks but when you figure those out it’s pretty good to use.
Best will be use joomla or wordpress, the hosting company which I have in mind is hostgator, I had webpage there with emails and unlimited transfer and storage for like £7 a month.
The webpage creation is straight forward, you have editor similar to Word to edit pages and you can see it immediately. If you want we can sit together some weekend or evening and sort this out to the extend that you will be comfortable to maintain blog/webpage by yourself. (I don’t believe this takes more than couple hours).
R
ps. Just seen prices, it is $7.16 (£4.39) a month, it can be cheaper if you pay for year or more.
This is all extremely helpful, thanks guys
Wordpress.org self-hosted on GoDaddy is what I use, 1 click install and a lot more options than wordpress.com
I’d note a friend helped me get set up and I was like, “really that’s it?” at then end. You’ll be flying in no time.
Hmmm, unfortunately the same clearly isn’t true of me. Still at it.
Well I think I have the domain name watfordjoinery.com, hosted by hostgator. I’ve certainly paid for it. I’ve found the control panel in Hostgator and installed wordpress from there.
Thing is, what on earth do I do now? It says that wordpress is installed and can be found at www.watfordjoinery.com, when I click the link it takes me to a ‘problem loading page’ screen. Any idea what I’m doing wrong?
Have you created any pages yet, or an index page? If there’s no content it won’t be able to show anything, hence “page cannot be displayed”
Wordpress should work without doing anything as a default blog page…
Website isn’t up though, as wordpress login page isn’t there either.
Gotta agree - the domain name doesn’t exist at the moment. It’s not found on the internet at all… were you told when the domain would be live?
I assumed it would be fairly instant? There was no mention of a delay.
I just don’t know how to put anything in the web space I’ve bought, with or without wordpress. :crazy:
Haven’t used hostgator, but I assume in the back end you clicked ‘install wordpress’? was it a one click install or were there all sorts of options to set up?
I’ve got a bit of a chaotic weekend ahead of me, but if you PM me the details they gave you when you signed up I can take a look for you when I’ve a minute? It might be something fairly simple (easy for an IT geek to say) that you’ve missed.
More than happy to help if I can…
They probably e-mailed you a direct link which would work right away, but would look like 200.120.76.50:4333 or maybe a url including their name in some way. Your own website wont work until DNS servers around the world are updated. Servers that hold website are all on an IP (like the number I posted) and DNS servers look up your website name (watfordjoinery.com) and point it to the correct IP. DNS servers can take a fair few hours to update.