Cookaholics Bulletin Board

Hi Amy,

I recommend Amaya for a free HTML editor and Gimp for a free image editor.

--Lisa

Photoshop CS2 is now free if you are familiar with it.

Or not, perhaps...

http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news ... -giveaway/

Heh. Oops. Here I was thinking how brilliant they were; a customer who is happy with CS2 is not a customer who is gonna pony up for CS6, so it would help hook them and crush the competition. Apparently I gave them too much credit.

Amy,

Ooops! I completely forgot you were a marketing geek before you were a chef!

Well, in that case you've already done hard part yourself.

Like I said, once you have your list of features, shop around. In addition to the platforms other people have mentioned, I know of:

• Gandi.net -- a domain host which has some kind of business web hosting. Reliable & respected.
• Yahoo Small Business Hosting
• Intuit (the Quickbooks people) have a small business hosting thing
• Squarespace.com
• Adobe Business Catalyst
• Around 8000 different sites offering Wordpress hosting (if you decide to use Wordpress)

Here's a good article, around a year old: http://mashable.com/2011/07/10/small-bu ... te-budget/

Of these, the only one I'd recommend is Gandi, becuase they're a good business and have good customer service. I don't know how good their web platform thing is, though. Any websites I've done have been "from scratch", so I don't know much about the quality of the builder kits.

My husband and I used Yahoo! small business hosting, but I can't recommend it unless you know HTML and FTP. Their interface is not intuitive, and their "builder" software is horrible. I did my husband's website, but I coded it myself (I hate the way most software adds unnecessary BS).

I've used squarespace customer service a few times and was quite happy. YMMV. I should point out that they are not a web hosting service, more of a content hosting service as the provide (i.e you must use) content management as well. They have very good variety in layout, templates and modification, but if you have a very strong vision in mind you're likely to fight the software instead of working with it. Even with all the templates and modification rules, it can be difficult to make your website look significantly different then the base one. If, however, you want to get content up fast that looks reasonably good (but without total creative control unless you really work at it) I have had some success with it. But needs -- and experiences -- definitely vary and they are not expensive, but still much more then straight hosting, especially for low volumes.

Paul,

Yeah, on the other hand, it's pretty hard to get a website designed (CSS, HTML and CMS) for less than a couple $thousand. We're currently redoing our company website, and it's costing us $6K plus dozens of staff hours.

I've looked at squarespace extensively, and I think that may just be the ticket I need.

Another question: ahcuisine.com is taken. I was thinking of ah-cuisine.com as a possible url, but also ahcreativecuisine.com, as it's available. Visceral reactions?

Amy

I think it is much more optimal to type in business name and get the site. Dashes don't really work, people don't think of them in urls. If you did use the dashed version, you'll have to depend on google search ranking for people to find you, and you'll be competing with another site. I think renaming your business to one with an available URL is much better. My $0.02