web geek (unix creator)
Well you certainly don’t need to pay for one. I cringe when I hear people saying that they’re paying someone or a techie friend of theirs is building them a website soon which will be useful for their enterprise, band, project, life etc – if they ever finish it.
I went through the website alternatives process before starting this blog a little while ago. I was seriously considering using the live local site but in the end I wanted a bit more flexibility and I’m very glad I went with wordpress. The first theme I had was the classic blog look with all the post scrawling down the page in full, with the typical poor navigation. Eventually I took the leap towards this current theme which looked way too flashy for my liking at the time but I was well into the magazine style layout on the front page so that people stumbling across it for the first time don’t just read this whole rant about websites but maybe they could look at a community garden story, some cargo bike reviews or listen to an audio piece on a men’s shed. Sorry, that was a very long sentence. *breathes* ahhh.
I doubt many people are fully aware that having ‘your own’ website means:
- You have digital real estate in the form of a domain name which comes knocking annually for $10, 20, 50 more? and if you don’t get the renew email you might just find you’ve lost your domain name, possibly forever ! Countless friends have had stress over this. Don’t let it happen to you!
- You have to pay a server company to host your site, this is according to how complex the site is and how many people access it. This tends to fluctuate and your server host generally won’t.
- Unless your web dude has setup a Content Managment System you probably need to be a web geek yourself or at least very tech savvy to ever have a hope of updating it
- Stale, old and non-updated websites look baaaaad. (I say this full well knowing that I have considerable black outs from updating this place, ahh “Do as i Say…”)
- ummm, I’ll think of another one soon enough. Just heckle below.
Alternatives for your own site:
Live local, Permaculture Global, Wiser Earth, Aussies Living Simply are all alternatives to having your own simliar simple/frugal/eco/permi blog. They might even be better for you because of the communities which are formed within each little directory group.
Instead of starting a travel blog, have a look around at sites which are built specifically for that, ive seen ones like My Trip Journal/Book, travelblog.org etc. They have alot of specific tools which suit traveling and staying in touch with folks eg: progress maps and itineraries which will prob be more efficient than setting up a blog from scratch for travel writing.
Website alternatives for Musos include Reverbnation or tools like soundcloud. Between them you could have everything you need to promote your music, tour dates, recording etc. If you have finished recordings to plug then Bandcamp is the clear independent alternative to AppleMacs force: iTunes, and it’s making its own little waves in the music industry.
Of course, im a big advocate of wordpress.com blogs since they are so flexible. Also, whilst im not thoroughly researched on this, the word-of-mouth vibe on their ethics/values is solid. We met some of the founders when tech-ing on a conference for them in Sydney – they were pretty solid decent web nerd characters. I say this in contrast to the bigger badder brother which is blogger, aka blogspot which google owns. Not fantastic for privacy or ethics I might suggest. They tend to be quite inflexible with the themes & layout (traditional blog scrawl) but more flexible with plugins eg: intense debate, link within etc which do not play nice with wordpress – and with all of this im talking about wordpress.com not .org, the difference is defined here for those keen folks yet to know.
Mum’s Music Site (case study/story): Take for example this workflow, my mother is a singer/teacher/performer and recently recorded an album.
Phase one was getting a blog site up which basically looks like a website, tabs, pages and all. Only the home page features the blog style reverse-chronological posts. We also looked around for online directories and posted her details on Music Teachers Online . A free alternative to a previous directory which she paid to be on, which is stuck in the web design dark ages of the 90’s. Things like myspace and reverbnation weren’t really relevant because she also wanted to promote these teaching aspects with extended blurbs. It’s here at http://sherineprins.wordpress.com. Zero setup costs and a quick, easy roll out made it a breeze for me to do. Now getting Mum to come up with content was another story 😉 we got there soon enough.
Phase two was getting some sound on there, also, relatively easy. Upload the recordings to SoundCloud then embed their player into the wordpress pages. Bingo! we had a setup which would save alot of time explaining about the teaching styles and the music performed and people could listen to performance samples straigh off the page and even download them to show to friends offline (mp3 players and the like). This provided a real alternative to a physical trip which people would make out to the studio to hear Mum perform her tunes for them individually. Very useful.
Phase Three was, once the album was all finished and ready, to get it out there! I know nothing better than Bandcamp for this, they are the shining light for musos as far as im concerned. So once that was all slowly uploaded at full quality the bandcamp wigdets also play nicely with the wordpress site so it’s all one happy family. As well as nailing digital downloads, the lovely BC folks also cater for physical units so our relatives and friends around the world could have a decent choice for how they would like Check out the bandcamp side of things here. By the way there is a 15% profitshare involved with the Bandcamp sales which sounds fair enough to me. Theres a whole van load of good reasons to check out there model, so I won’t rave anymore here. Apart from putting a litte widget here to demonstrate, one of about 7 which you can customise alot:
Pretty pro hey? Overall I reckon a nice tidy solution – and that’s just one example. Theres loads of free tools which you can assemble to suit your needs, perhaps just a simple directory site is all you need, perhaps a slightly complex arrangement like this one. Good luck with it whatever the project. Feel free to bug me for more info below..
*update: hey – just as i was saying this is a negative point for wordpress.com (non-social network comment plug in) – theyve just gone ahead and rolled it out. cheers wordpress folks – keep rolling out the good stuff!
frugalist massive 
annette
September 15, 2011
Nice post Dylan! I couldn’t agree more (and I make my living from making websites).
WordPress.com is great these days. If you really want your own domain name you can pay a little each year to add that on. My mum has used it to set up a couple of sites for co-ops she’s involved in.
There are so many amazing tools out there these days. Here’s another couple for the pile:
CarbonMade
http://carbonmade.com/
Sexy online portfolio for visual artists
Posterous
http://examples.posterous.com/
I love that you can send an email in and it turns into a post. If you attach images, they are magically arranged into a gallery for you. Great for people who are travelling and need to share info / photos quickly and easily.
And for those folks who want to sell some of their fabulous handmade creations, there are sites like:
http://madeit.com.au & http://www.etsy.com/
I haven’t used them myself, but my wool obsessed geek girl friend Kylie has been using Etsy to sell her hand dyed wool. http://www.etsy.com/people/msgusset
Keep it simple, keep it free or very cheap. Save your money and energy for your amazing projects.
Cam Slice
September 15, 2011
I think this article should be title “No, You don’t need a website if you have plenty of time to learn how to make your own, your website doesn’t require an special features and you are an individual or small business that doesn’t require a strong online presence.”
If you are a company that needs a professional website then you should definitely pay someone to custom design it, install a CMS, thoroughly test content and functionality, manage the deployment process, provide email solutions and manage hosting. Any website that costs less than $2000 is probably using a themed template using a free web tool such as WordPress anyway, and the designer or developer is simply charging for their time. These sites may look nice and do everything that a small business needs in the short term, but are not geared toward expandability or specialised features.
I guess what i’m saying is you get what you pay for 🙂
eedeep
September 20, 2011
Yeah I’d probably second Cam Slice’s comments. As a case in point re the viability of a WordPress site, either hosted or running your own instance, being able to do what you need or more to the point what you want, I just finished rebuilding this ex-Wordpress site in django/django-cms:
http://www.energyforopportunity.org
It a while, required custom programming and more specialist skills in terms of installing and configuring the framework and CMS and was basically yeah just a lot more work than it would have been to get something *similar* up and running under WordPress. And after I finished I thought, hmm, actually in functional terms this is *fairly* similar to what they had before….have I just gone to a whole lot of trouble (all voluntarily I might add) for not much real benefit here? I wondered briefly whether it might have been my own techie hubris that blinded me from taking the path of least resistance/greatest simplicity, which is ultimately what we should always be aiming for (providing that is, and this is THE caveat, it allows us to do what we want/need). Ultimately though in the back of my mind I knew that was not the case because I’ve thought about this a lot and am pretty confident that, as Cam Slice points out, if you want flexibility, extensibility and highly customised/bespoke features then (at least from a developer’s point of view) WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and pretty much any “monolithic” CMS platform represent nothing short of a world of pain. To illustrate the point, what they really wanted on the aforementioned site was to be able to add projects with some structured data (project facts) and a set of images for each project along with being able to specify a programme area for each project to enable browsability by programme area. There was no “easy” way to do something like using WordPress, as far as I could see. Maybe there is but I didn’t want to spend half my life learning how to shoehorn WordPress into doing it, especially when it was highly likely that the end result would probably have some shortcomings and not be exactly what was wanted anyway. So I made the choice to go with a platform that I know is robust and rapid for doing custom web development and also has a whole bunch of readily available 3rd party apps/modules which I can make use of for standard but actually fairly complex things like a blogging engine, for example. The best of both worlds, if you like.
Basically what I’m getting at there is the web variant of the 80 20 rule aka the Pareto Principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle which translated in this context could be taken to mean that you can easily end up spending 80% of your time trying to implement 20% of the features. Or more specifically in this case I guess: you often spend a fucking age trying to shoehorn WordPress into doing what you actually want.
On the other hand if you can handle, like the Rolling Stones suggested, not always getting exactly what you want then WordPress and probably a lot of those other services mentioned in your post will probably represent a great option. But I guess the Stones wrote that song for a reason – ie, someone cracking it because they weren’t getting what they wanted. So yeah, not everyone is prepared to suck it up and settle for something that’s not quite what they really want.
So as far as an alternative title goes for me it would be “No. Not Everyone Needs A Website. Do You?”