We are looking forward to working with Nuage for our new website platform …

We are updating our website platform. When we started out (in 2007) we had clear simple ideas of what we wanted: it had to be professional enough, easy to adapt, and inexpensive to set-up and run.

A Less Entrepreneurial Way

In 2005, at my last company we had a professional site made for us. We told the supplier what to write, we didn’t expect many ongoing changes and our budget was £5,000. This is pretty much what we got: http://www.cambridge-fluid.com.

It’s professional enough – but for a new business / idea or a dynamic SME, it was not easy to adapt, and £5,000k was relatively expensive compared to other options available today (2009).

Pro: professional
Con: not easy to edit, expensive by todays options
Price: £5,000

The More Entrepreneurial Way to a Professional Site

INITIALLY

The first way forward was DIY: grab a domain name or two and get some website writing software on the PC (in this case Webeasypro7). It certainly allowed easy enough webcreation and posting content.

It produced something like this: http://xi-solutions.co.uk/.

To make the content a little more appealing we used simple desktop publishing (e.g. MS Publisher) and photo-editing (Adobe Photoshop) for cropping / collaging photos and making logos.

Pro: affordable
Con: not easily editable, amateurish
Price: approx £200 upfront, approx £20 / month ongoing

THE SECOND STEP

We looked around at a few options to advance what we had:-
- MS Publisher – wasn’t very much better
- 1and1 web builder – no better than free software online
- spruz – seemed more online building of social networks
- wordpress – see below

WordPress was a good one. Editing on an ongiong basis was certainly easier and we seemed closer to being a more professional site. WordPress was availble on line for free.

The downside was that a truly slick solution couldn’t quite be pulled together by non a IT / website professional i.e. without professional assistance we got this far: http://www.sapien-equipment.com.

Pro: affordable, very editable
Con: with basic IT skils, can’t set-up to give it slick appearance
Price: no additional costs (already spent £200 upfront & £20/mth ongoing)

THE NEXT STEP

The next step considered using some web / IT professionals to setting up a hosted version of wordpress (or Joomla or Drupal).

In fact we have chosen to go with Nuage-IT to set-up a hosted platform of WordPress.

Watch this space for the result and updated views.