Website Creation Advice

[Halogen23]

Two friends have asked me to create a website for them for their non-profit ministry/music activities. They already have a domain name chosen through Godaddy.com. I havent used dreamweaver in such a long time(since 2004) that I really have forgotten how to use it. My fiancée has a copy for mac, but I would rather use my desktop than her macbook pro.

First of all, is there any limiting factors in creating the website with Godaddy, and how can i deal with that?

Secondly, based on your experience and knowledge, how should I go about putting the whole thing together? I know they want to have different tabs for sections, add music to be played, links to facebook, twitter and youtube and the ability for interactivity(leaving comments, possibly a blog like section also for updating followers, etc).

Lastly, I know these guys dont have a ton of money, but they are willing to pay me for the whole deal. I am willing to be very generous for them because they are good friends of mine. I was thinking something pretty low like $200-300, but what would you say a fair price to ask for 20-30 hours worth of work would be?

 

[Markbnj]

I don't know how much you should charge, but I would go with a package like Wordpress, or Drupal if you are more ambitious. Dreamweaver is useful for creating raw HTML wireframes and site designs (though I don't like the markup generated by any of the visual tools I've used) but that's not really going to be the challenge.

 

[ViviTheMage]

Two friends have asked me to create a website for them for their non-profit ministry/music activities. They already have a domain name chosen through Godaddy.com. I havent used dreamweaver in such a long time(since 2004) that I really have forgotten how to use it. My fiancée has a copy for mac, but I would rather use my desktop than her macbook pro.

First of all, is there any limiting factors in creating the website with Godaddy, and how can i deal with that?

Secondly, based on your experience and knowledge, how should I go about putting the whole thing together? I know they want to have different tabs for sections, add music to be played, links to facebook, twitter and youtube and the ability for interactivity(leaving comments, possibly a blog like section also for updating followers, etc).

Lastly, I know these guys dont have a ton of money, but they are willing to pay me for the whole deal. I am willing to be very generous for them because they are good friends of mine. I was thinking something pretty low like $200-300, but what would you say a fair price to ask for 20-30 hours worth of work would be?

Definitely more then 200-300$, that's my opinion though.

You could just get some hosting somewhere else that offers free templates ... like we do . Allows you to ply with 23000 some templates, and modify them all online, and not need any software.

 

[troytime]

20 or 30 hours!??

use wordpress. have them pick a cool theme, and customize it a bit with the graphics.
have it hosted somewhere for 100/year.

start to finish can be less than 3 hours.

 

[Cogman]

If you really want to do it from scratch, then I would suggest not using dream weaver. Like Mark said, it usually produces some pretty ugly and unmaintainable HTML. Breaking out your favorite notepad editor and typing it from scratch is really the way to go for a static html page.

If you want to have any sort of dynamic content, then I agree with troytime and the others, using something like wordpress would really be the direction to go. Dynamic content is tricky to get right, and certainly can't be done (AFAIK) using dreamweaver. Otherwise, you will be spending a large amount of time doing development stuff you really don't want to do.

 

[BoberFett]

The days of static websites are over. As someone else said, find a host for $5/mo. and put up a Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal site for them.

 

[sourceninja]

I do a $150.00 wordpress setup for friends. I will get them a domain, hosting for a year on my reseller account, setup wordpress, install a theme of their choice (if they want one that costs money they have to buy it) and give them a 1 hour lesson on using wordpress.