How to make a simple business website?

Question

A plumber friend has asked me how to make a basic website for people to see on Google search results, which as a SWE of >10 years lands right in the middle of "Things it sounds like I should know" and "Things I don't know". I'm just not sure which DIY tool to recommend.I can look into this, but figured you all would know best. What should we use?Thanks!

skilled · Accepted Answer

To be completely honest? WordPress. It will cost you around $70 to buy a theme that looks 80% of the way there and all you have to do is change the placeholder images and text. And the same goes for plugins, for this kind of a "basic" project every single plugin you need is going to be free.
I don't know it's worth spending your own time trying to create something custom or mess around with website builders because in the end it will cost a lot more than that $70 for a premium theme.
That said, it will be a few hours (2 or 3 maybe?) to set everything up.
But that's just my opinion.

theduder99 · Answer

If the goal is for the plumber to be able to setup and maintain it on his own then I'd recommend wix or squarespace. Otherwise wordpress as mentioned in the other comment.

solardev · Answer

Don't DIY it. Whatever you do today will be hard to maintain in two years. You don't want to be the person he always calls for helps for updates.
Just have him put it on Wix or Squarespace or Square business or such.
Don't mess with WordPress either. Not worth the complexity for a simple business page.

CM30 · Answer

Depends exactly what you need. If the site only needs to provide a bit of info about the business plus a contact form, then just about any CMS or site builder would be perfect here. WordPress could do this, SquareSpace or Wix could do this, and heck, you could even do it manually just by buying/finding a template (maybe a Bootstrap one?) and coding a few static pages. As long as you don't do anything obviously disastrous for SEO (like say, making it entirely reliant on a poorly coded SPA, sticking your text in images, not including title tags, etc), it should work perfectly fine regardless of what you do.You'd probably want to choose the CMS or site builder if your plumber friend wants to actually maintain the site and add content though.

kaikai · Answer

I&rsquo;ve helped multiple non-technical people successfully make squarespace sites. It has the option to buy a domain and the fees are cheap. It&rsquo;s totally worth the site builder and included themes.

LunarAurora · Answer

For a free option, The new Google sites is not bad [1].[1] https://sites.google.com/

billylo · Answer

I use mobirise.com to create + Firebase hosting (free for low volume).

How to make a simple business website?

If the goal is for the plumber to be able to setup and maintain it on his own then I'd recommend wix or squarespace. Otherwise wordpress as mentioned in the other comment.

I’ve helped multiple non-technical people successfully make squarespace sites. It has the option to buy a domain and the fees are cheap. It’s totally worth the site builder and included themes.

For a free option, The new Google sites is not bad [1].
[1] https://sites.google.com/

I use mobirise.com to create + Firebase hosting (free for low volume).