Web hosting advice

[hannaugh]

My mom and her friend are opening a new business in the next month or two.  They have enlisted me to do a lot of their graphic design and online stuff (managing their facebook page, etc).  They want me to help them create a website.  The site will be mostly informational at first, but they want to eventually sell stuff online and set up a cart and all that. 

I built websites many years ago using Homestead (because I am okay with design, but I don't know anything about writing code).  My mom and her friend are somewhat computer illiterate.  I would like to help them set the website up, but keep everything simple enough that they can do cart maintenance and make simple changes without calling me every 2 minutes while I'm at school or my other job asking me to come over and change things for them. 

Can anyone here recommend some options for how I can get this done? I know there are hosting places around such as fatcow.com and homestead, but it seems like the results often don't work that well and kind of look less than professional (that was my experience with homestead anyways.  Our site loaded very slowly and was pretty buggy).  I have Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium, and I should be upgrading it to the current version in the next 6 months, but I've never tried website stuff with it before.  Any ideas?

 

[mayfly]

I've been very very pleased with what you can do with this:

http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/overview/

I have a slightly older version, and have done Cornflower Blue's site with it:

www.cornflowerbluemusic.com

Oh and I host out of DreamHost - but to be honest they are all really about the same.

 

[Jusatele]

for a computer nube
I would suggest ymaking them a homepage and possibly a few other pages so the website looks nice, you know talking up the product
But I would go with a store front service for the product
that way it is super simple to change a product or price, state that out are out of something temporarily
you pay per month according to how many products you have to sell
and guess what, they do tech support of the storefront because that is actually on their site
so
your pages are on a simple hosting plan you choose where ever you do your web hosting
the store front is on someone else' s site that does tech support for it, plus you can find sites that they are the CC processor so you do not have to mess with all of that, they charge a small percentage.
It makes it a no brainer for a small company with limited product line
and once your line gets big, well you need a full time guy anyway

 

[MSP]

I have several sites live right now.  Use a WordPress platform and build what you like on it.  You can create sites that look nothing like a WordPress blog.  Do some searches for WordPress themes and pick something.  I like Woo Themes (site is down for maintenance right now, but back up soon) and Theme Forest.  Definitely take the time to check out Woo when they go back up.  Lots of places have free themes if you don't wanna spend anything, though the purchased themes are not very expensive at all.

For hosting I tend to go with Hostmonster or Site5 these days.  I've used a few different hosts and those two are pretty good.  I liked Bluehost for a while, but then they started having issues.  Not sure if they still do, but I've been hosting elsewhere for a while. 

 

[hannaugh]

Thanks for the input, guys.  I have been looking around.  I think I could get a handle on Dreamweaver without too much pain, but I don't think my mom and her friend would be able to figure it out.  That Rapidweaver program looks pretty good, but none of us have Macs.  I think we're going to try fatcow or wordpress and see what they're like.  Maybe later on if it really takes off, we'll go the pro route. 

 

[-CB-]

Nothing like hosting your own.....

Doesn't take much.  A spare PC running Linux - doesn't have to be a speedy PC, and decently speedy connection.  Very simple.