As probably most of you experienced yourselves I recently have been asked to create a website for a friends business as a favour. It’s going to be just a simple website. We’ve all been there and we know what this could lead to.
Now how to reduce the risks?
We know that a job like this isn’t going to be simply over once the website is installed. A job like this usually means a long-term engagement that can easily stretch over years.
So my first answer is: Don’t program anything!!!
Instead choose any available service that suits the needs of your friend.
In my case a simple CMS for a handful of pages was needed so the easiest option would be to create a new site on wordpress.com point a custom domain to it and be done with it.
Unfortunately the site needed to support multiple languages which is not really achievable with wordpress.com.
So I kept my decision for wordpress but opted for a self hosted option.
Instead of fiddling with wordpress to get some multi language thing set up I opted to buy the WPML plugin for that and while at it threw in the wpSEO plugin as well.
I installed everything on my laptop to set up all the pages and next I will move everything to a hoster I created an account for my friend at.
When finally pointing the desired domain to it I will integrate it with the Google services so that email, calendar and docs (drive) are available for this domain.
The beautiful thing with wordpress and Google is that they are fully documented and known to be working. So I don’t have to do much else than setting up everything and then pointing to the docs. Even if at some point some development work is necessary this could easily be done by another person as only public knowledge is necessary.
No tags
