How to get a low budget personal website created?

[bejeeber]

Hey Kayle, that's such a cool looking (IMO) mp3 player/widget - whatever it is - you have on your home page playing the nice 06 Claire's Music Box music.

Is that actually something SquareSpace will convert from your WordPress site? Not a proprietary Wordpress thing?

[Edit] Oh wait a minute...nevermind I think I found the Soundcloud answer to the question of where that player came from.

[kclements]

I am not sure if Square Space will do the soundcloud player or not. I haven't looked that far into it. And to tell you the truth - I can get completely wrapped up in doing a new Web site rather than doing a new piece of music. It is far too easy for me to get distracted by learning new bells and whistles and new services to create a Web site and posting it, and putting on lots of shine - and next thing you know, the day is gone. So, I am renewing my commitment to my simple, current Web site and sticking with WordPress. It isn't all that fancy, but I think it looks nice and gets the job done.

It is just a simple WP template that I added some stuff to. It took me maybe 2 hours to completely do from start to finish. There are lots of advanced stuff you can do with WP if you choose, but again, I can loose hours/days in that stuff, so I tend to limit myself. If you know a little bit of html/css you can do a lot of stuff in WP.

Thanks -
kc

[coachdebra]

Yes, I agree - wordpress rocks!

And I'm a complete technophobe or used to be before wordpress came into my life. If you need help getting setup I have a few folks I can refer you to (one guy who will just get you up and running and another guy who can do the whole thing including design) - but if you're at all tech savvy (not me!) just get hosting that supports the wordpress download and download the software free.

If you're looking for the best wordpress plugins - mashable.com is a great resource for all things SoMe and Wordpress. And if you're at all unsure of a plugin (open source plugins - you never know what you're getting). I usually google reviews+plugin name and there will be plenty of feedback about just about all of them.

BTW - all three of my sites are built on wordpress (main artists-edge.com site, Membership site, and my blog) - the only site I have NOT built on wordpress is the Ask Coach Debra site - because it's such a simple little thing. But even that I had someone else do, because it's so not my forte.

[zircon]

Another vote for WordPress... I maintain a number of sites using it.

This site:

http://www.zircontrax.com/

Was pretty much done in about 24 hours total by modifying a premade theme and tweaking some code here and there.

[Rob Lorenzo]

+1 on Wordpress. Still building my site - bit of an amateur with web stuff and getting on well with Wordpress.

Use Hostgator for hosting following recommendations. So far, so good.