Building a website
The first thing i recommend is creating a project folder in the cloud; this will be useful for storing and sharing content with your development team. You can do this in One Drive; this allows you to share the folder without giving out a password.
Creating a secure password to share with developers will be better than sharing your one; they say writing a password down isn’t a good idea however, in this case, you may only need this once a year, and it will be impossible to remember.
You may wish to try using a self-building tool or templates as your first attempt; If this is too complex or you can’t get the desired design, you can always show a developer what you have done to help you explain your ideas.
To begin creating a website, you will need these things:
- Domain Name – The website address, like a house address for your site.
- Server – A physical place to store files and software to serve the files correctly.
- Website – The actual files that are loaded to display the site.
A Web Host can provide all these things for you, even design the site for you; however, they are expensive over the long term and often require you to use self-building tools.
I like to design my website from scratch because it gives me the most control; however, I usually use WordPress as the engine rather than programming from scratch because it allows integration with other developers and can nock weeks off the development time.
A cheaper alternative to a host is to use a cloud-based virtual machine; they are very complicated and would suggest you have a good security solution. Think of them as a new computer with no software; you’ll have to install each bit of software to add different features.
You may want to add things like CDN, SSL, Backups, File management, SSH or anything you can think of. They can take all day to set up and work; I use a third-party tool to manage the server and implements these features for me.
Unless you are willing to put in the effort and learn how to build and manage a website, you should hire someone to do this for you. There is a lot involved with setting up a site; however, once built, you may wish to manage it by yourself or hire someone to do it.