Idiot proof web development - your advice please!

PistolPete

Member
I've been feeling for a while that my website has been in need of a freshen up.

The current pistolpetewearn.co.uk was designed by me in 2013 or 14 - and then a friend was kind enough to sort out the code for me so it actually worked (he swapped some things I'd tried to do with html into java script, sorted out the css & a few other things).

Since then I've updated the pictures & the information but the basic bones have remained the same. The last significant change was moving the discography into two columns to accommodate my new album & a significant amount of swearing took place before it displayed correctly...

It seems in the meantime a number of services have come to the fore allowing people like me who have limited technological know-how to have a good looking website without too much hassle.

So I was wondering what you professionals think of things like Wix & wordpress (& Weebly & Squarespace & any others that have appeared without me noticing)?

What are the pitfalls I should be looking out for? How easy is it to get a website from one of these services up onto my own domain - or will someone typing in my .co.uk web address always end up with a clunky redirect to wix.com/peteswebsite/index.htm?

Thanks in advance for your assistance!
 
Apologies - I thought I'd started this in the Web Design forum. If one of the mods wants to move it I would be very grateful...
 
If you get a Wix 'Combo' subscription for about £60pa you can use your own domain name. This isn't too bad a cost erally.

Obviously another option is to use Wordpress or something on your current hosting. Wordpress is often touted as being an easy solution but really to get the most from it you need to know how to set it up and maintain it properly. If you don't keep on top of updates it can be a massive security risk, especially out of date plugins. Many web hosts sell hosting that comes with a Wordpress installation already running, which probably works out about the same or possibly even more than the Wix subscription.

My opinion generally tends to be sites like Wix, Squarepace etc serve a particular purpose. If someone just needs a site that looks good and works up and running quickly, then they're ideal. If you need/want more customisation options and flexibility over design and functionality then a custom design/build or theme is necessary.
 
Squarespace themes seem to be well put together and user friendly. Have a look at the music themes available and if one of them works for you.. then go for that!

If you cant get on with squarespace then wordpress is your next option but as Paul has mentioned is more involved. In my opinion, one of the biggest issues with wordpress is the amount of choice users get with free themes, plugins etc.. Some stuff works, some doesnt, one plugin can break another, one plugin might just stop working and because its free, the support can be pretty awful. If you go down the wordpress route, look for a paid theme that does 99% of what you want then pop back here and ask for advice on the 1% fucntionality and any restyling issues. As for securtiy.. The wordpress core updates itself (unless it's a major update) to resolve security issues but you're responsible for updating plugins and I'd always recommend additional protection through a plugin like "iThemes Security".

If you need any additional help or advice feel free to give me a shout.
 
Hey im a guitar player myself , been for over a decade so i really like what you do , anyway on to the topic at hand.
You are correct there are many do it yourself website builders that are emerging. However from marketing and seo perspective , thiese build it yourself sites can be a huge issue. You can buy a theme that looks great only to find a very poor internal structure , or code bloat which will hinder any attempts at seo . BUt since you are marketing yourself lets move past that. I agree with what dave has said that there isnt or shouldn't be too much in it , that somebody couldn't give you a quick few tips on how to fix things up a little or make it better.

Im not sure how much you care about seo , or how you are marketing this website and yourself ,eg via social media but you should keep that in consideration as a website means nothing if it cant be seen,be it via social media , a search engine or even word of mouth some kind of push is needed.

If i have not added any value with my post here is some for you , you site isnt responsive , meanng if you scale it down to a phone size it doesnt change , this is not a great thing as som many people use mobile platforms to do any kind of searching.. Maybe you have a "mobi site going " a separate website specifically made for mobile , this however is also very bad practice.

So just for not it looks great but if i had searched it on my phone , i would have bounced off the site and never come back to it again , something i think you need to look into.

With the help of guys like Dave and other mods "idiot proofing" your site shouldnt be a big deal.

Regards
Juan
 
Sorry but i have something else t add was actually listening to your songs and started tinkering,,,, please review these two images i think you need to sort this out before anything else. Once op has confirmed reading this could a moderator please delete this post as i dont want people taking advantage. Thanks
 

Attachments

  • Site file.JPG
    Site file.JPG
    36.2 KB · Views: 6
  • Stolen.JPG
    Stolen.JPG
    54.9 KB · Views: 6
Sorry but i have something else t add was actually listening to your songs and started tinkering,,,, please review these two images i think you need to sort this out before anything else. Once op has confirmed reading this could a moderator please delete this post as i dont want people taking advantage. Thanks

Hi thanks for taking a look (& having a listen!).

I'm a little confused by your post. I actually updated from my own html to a Wix site at the start of December, about 5 days after I started this thread. After reviewing all of the suggestions & deciding I liked one of their templates best. A belated thank you to everyone else who offered advice.

If you are alluding to the fact the music player is hosted on wix.com, that's because I'm now paying them for that service.

I was interested in your comments about mobile viewing - I think the new wix site works pretty well on mobile (viewing on my Galaxy S7). Certainly a lot better than the old one did & I made one or two tweaks from the automatic stack function wix applies to get the elements to appear in the correct order, so I'm surprised you don't feel it's responsive enough.
 
OK i followed the link you posted and from there i can easily download all of your music without buying your cd .... this is what i was referring to with the images. If you have sorted that out thats great i am just going on the link you posted. If you look at the bottom of the second image in full view you can see i downloaded the track , for a paid service i would expect them to not allow people to bypass the player so easily. Maybe i am missing something but i would hate that.

Whats happening with regards to your mobile version , is this : back in the day we used to have websites for desktops and then a mobile version for phones when smartphones were still in its infancy. Google As mobile usage grew google announced that it prefers a responsive site , this is ONE website ( html page or whatever ) that shows to any platform that searches it. Your analytics , content everything is canonical spread over two sites essentially . People could be swaying in and out of the mobile site too. This is all bad news for browsers .

HOWEVER it seems i was quick to judge it seems wix has adjusted this part of their system using javascript and class changes in the css upon detection of a mobile device it will switch the css and layout. Thus resizing on a desktop will yield no changes or responsiveness but on a phone it will display as you designed it.

Im not really sure what to make of that to be honest :) only your analytics will give you the answer , but i didnt see that in the site , ( correct me if i am wrong).

Anyway im not here to rub you the wrong way while a found a nasty article about wix and the comments still run up to 2017 , i also found a article talking about positive changes wix has brought about.
https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/3-reasons-wix.com-fails-for-business-websites
http://webenso.com/is-wix-seo-friendly/
 
Argg tried to edit it , look if its working how you intend and you are getting the traffic you want , the exposure , and all of those things why change something that isnt broken right? . In any case i think im going into worst case scenarios here.
 
Ah - I see where you're coming from now.

I (obviously) hadn't realised how easy it was to grab tracks from the site without paying for them.

There's a few other options - there doesn't seem to be a wix Bandcamp app, which is how I manged the music on my old site, but I could embed a player from Soundcloud, Spotify or iTunes, which would presumably close that loophole. I do wonder how much I need to worry about it - there's a Russian torrent site that has shared my last two albums within hours of them appearing on iTunes, so I'm already very much relying on the goodwill of people to pay for my music. The Wix music player was included with the subscription, is visually coherent with the template I used, & they don't take a percentage of sales so it seemed like a win until you pointed out that people didn't actually *need* to pay for the tracks.

Wix do offer an SEO wizard, which I hadn't looked at previously, but have just run through now, so I will see how much difference that makes.

Don't worry about rubbing me the wrong way - I appreciate you taking the time to share your expertise. I'm not a web designer - I'm a musician who hangs around here because I enjoy designing posters & I'm acutely aware most of what I do know about web development is almost twenty years out of date.
 
Hmm its unfortunate that things are this way but if somebody wants to attain something over the internet bad enough they will find a way, it is inevitable. Fortunately most of these Hackers, content stealers ect ect are very lazy and dont want to go to effort to get your content.

For this reason most of them have spiders and bots crawling the web doing all the dirty work for them . If you have access to your htacess file or any section within wix where you can block ip's, bots and user agent strings i would go and google a list an updated list of " bad bots " and apply that. I dont think wix will allow you that kind of access , so i would try to get a CDN like cloudflare , they usually also stop DDos attacks and have lists of updated bots. ( I also see now however cloudflare isnt available for wix. )

In fact you know what id do , id take it up with them , ask them for a solution against bots , i am pretty sure they would have something to assist you, you are a paying client after all so why should this be your issue.

It wont stop everything this i can tell you but it should stop most of them.
 
Back
Top