Your experience with pre-made websites ?

LeSedna

Mat or Mateo
Jan 20, 2008
5,391
2
38
Montpellier, France
Hello

I'm thinking of re-doing my home studio webpage cause in a few months I may start trying locally to mix for bands.

I wanna go OFF the CMS route. It's just a hassle for such a little website. The goal is like any studio website, just to show the usual information, so it will be simple AND classy.

I have two options :

-Making it myself, with Dreamweaver (please don't tell me it does bad code and that it is better to code it oneself. This is true but I don't wanna learn just for that, and Dreamweaver actually works very well for simple websites if you know a little how to work with it a hybrid way) so it would be a basic static html page (not even php, no need for actual dynamic info, I can edit the html instead, at least for the moment)
-Use a template, a Flash pre-built website. I think this can be possible since such a website is little, has only a few pages, and therefore shouldn't be too hard to settle from a pre-made little package.

I have seen many things like that that look promising :
- supposedly free flash designs like that http://www.flashmo.com/preview/flashmo_077_jeans the exemple is not relevant for a studio but you get the point.
- supposedly free flash design websites where you can build it from scratch like that : http://www.wix.com/flash_design/fish_new

My question is did any of you used such a free template ? How did it go ? What can you recommend ? Do you think it's crap and it's still better to hire somebody for that ? I'm concerned about the money it could cost because of the flash animation. I cannot do this even if I knew a bit of flash a long time ago, and I prefer not investing too much in it for the moment. I know it is better, but it I can have something still classy enough, and for free, that would be great.

Thanks :)
 
I personally like what dreamweaver does. You can get great results with it, especially with the new version. Seems like you know how the program works, so I would go that route.
 
I love Dreamweaver. I learnt the basis when it was still named "GoLive". It's simple and practical to use. What I like with it in my particular case is that it will be easy to make it visual since there is no need for big complicated content. Still, I'm a bit stuck to basic static websites with it, hence why I am interested in an easy way to have flash content.

Guitarguru, why not Wix ?

I'm not too sure about wordpress. I think a CMS is too complicated for my use (Joomla is a pain in the ass for almost no interest here) and it would still be a static website, or maybe I'm misunderstanding ?