Recently one of my relatives approached me to ask for help. He is currently renovating some land he owns to form some tourist lodgings, and plans to make a bussiness of it, along with organizing trips to the countryside, and various other tourist activities.
As the only member of the family who uses a pc with any degree of competence and understanding, I was approached to create a page in which he could direct potential clients to. Such a page would contain all the relevant information, offers, schedules, some contact information, photographs and the likes, with the possibility of it needing to serve as a transaction medium, through which he and the clients could form a deal.
The page need not be anything fanciful or elaborate. Just something in which he can post regular updates, direct people to, and get the job done.

Only problem is I know as much about web design as your average cockroach. My pc time has been devoted to either gaming or surfing the internet, none of which have given me a clue as to how to make something like that.

Is there anyone savvy enough to help me? I'll be thankful for any degree of help. If I can learn how to do it in relatively short amount of time, a couple months, let's say, then I could use some guides, tips, and help in how to go about it.
If it is too intricate to learn easily, is there some way I could have this done by someone else without paying the hair of my head to a professional?

I stand to make money off of this(something that I haven't done in months), so I'm very much interested in its success. Maybe if it does well I'll even attend the Germany meetup.

So, having read what we need, more or less, what do you guys think I should do? Can someone help me?



P.S: I thought this the most appropriate thread, hopefully wasn't wrong.

 

For clarity: creating a website that does not require any sort of user interaction is a much easier problem to solve than creating a website that does have user interaction implemented. You should modify your approach accordingly.

 

If it's such a difference, I guess we could exclude user interaction for the time being.
As I said, we just want a page with information on everything there is on offer, and contact information.


I'll check out what Jon suggested. Thanks for replying guys. Any other tips or help is welcome.

 

There is a giant difference. Children with limited help from somebody competent may make static webpage, proper handling of user data is something that requires more than "I am able to use computer".

 

The difference is the difference between making a forum post and coding a forum.

 

Jon's suggestion is the best in my opinion, though if you know nothing about HTML and CSS this course in Code Academy is free and will teach you a lot.

 

Personally, I've use joomla myself and after a bit of trial and error, I've managed to make something decent presenting my business (no interaction with the client) in barely a week.

So if you need any kind of help with joomla just shoot me a pm and I'll try to help as much as I can!

 

I've been using Wordpress, I recommend it. There are ways to add more user interaction, as well, though I don't know what exactly you are looking for.

Check out the plugins, they might inspire you.

I think BuddyPress might accomplish what you want.

 

Wow, thanks for the help guys. I will make lots of free time tomorrow or sunday and sit down and go through all of these, to see what I need to do and how it works.
Thanks for posting that course, Longinus, I'll check it out.
I'll come to you guys for further questions here or in IRC.

 

Taking on Longinus' course in Code Academy. It's fascinating.

 

A friend of mine suggested Dreamweaver (or somesuch) over programs like wordpress or joomla.

Thoughts on dreamweaver?

 

Dreamweaver, aside from being expensive, is a bit on the complex side but once you know what you're doing, it's very very efficient.

My final project for computer science is a webpage and I'm presenting on it in class tomorrow. I tend to write my code in Notepad ++. Aside from CodeAcademy, W3Schools and MDN have some useful stuff.

As you'll soon find out, just one misplaced/mistyped word/letter/symbol, etc has the potential to ruin your entire code. That's where this baby comes in; just copy/paste your code, and it'll point out errors (not 100%, but most). If there's a website you like, just rightclick - View Page Source which show you the coding for the website, or on Chrome - right-click Inspect Element (I like this one better, as you can be really specific about which portion of the website's code you want to see). Just don't bite off more than you can choose. Hit up #programming on IRC as well, Raven, Minion, Oz, KrzaQ have all helped me in the past with questions.

If you don't want to go the coding route, Wix might be somethin you want to look at, apart from Wordpress and Joomla.

Good luck!

 

no.

For your listed requirements (other than potential online booking / payments - which is way beyond your capabilities anyway), wordpress or similar is your best option.

Blog ('post regular updates') function is built in, and you can have as many other pages as you desire with whatever else (schedules, contact info, photos, etc).

Better yet - you can do basically all of it without having to touch a line of code.

You don't need to know html/css to do a wordpress site either - you can get great layouts for cheap / free.