Project Management of Website Implementation

[dche5390]

I'm in the process of seriously considering wedding photography as an eventual full-time career. I am in no way ready to dive in head-first due to many constraints, one being time!

However, whilst I develop a business plan, consult my parents for financial/mentorship advice (as parents certainly love to dish this out!), I figured I may as well do something constructive and work on a website.

I intend on having the website up and running in 3 months time. Not in a particular rush since I have other commitments.

I have been sold on using the CMS of wordpress. I have yet to arrange my own webhosting and domain registration. As I am an Australian, I have the relevant business registration sorted out (aha!).

My question to you learned folk is a bit of a chicken or egg dilemma.

Do I organise my webhosting and domain name first or work on the content of the website (offline)? Or the other way round? Or it doesn't matter?

Part of the fun in photography and my proposed business is doing the legwork myself. I have some limited knowledge and experience with webdev but as I said, time is a constraint.

I've flagged a couple of photos I wish to display as my online portfolio. So content-wise, it is the "what am I going to say to sell myself" that needs work. I've got it in my head what to say but that needs to be translated onto "paper" so to speak.

I am hard set on using a non-flash-based website. So many ideas and dreams swirling around my head!

Thanks in advice for your comments.

Cheers,
Dan

[RockSlut]

My experience of wordpress is that its not much use developing offline - I don't even know if there is an easy way to do this. I'd suggest arranging both your domain and hosting and then start your experimentation in wordpress.

Even with limited design skills you should be able to have something really basic in a couple of hours then reasonably polished, if simple within a couple of days. There's also some good wordpress template providers geared towards photographers that provide really good control to make your site even more polished.

Given that you don't currently have a web presence or your business off the ground you can develop to your hearts content and only make the site searchable once you are happy with what you've created (there is an option for this in the wordpress control panel).

[dsd17]

Do I organise my webhosting and domain name first or work on the content of the website (offline)? Or the other way round? Or it doesn't matter?

It really makes no difference which way you do it. I would suggest purchasing a domain name as soon as you think of one you like. You can hold onto domain names forever and never do anything with them until you're ready.

At my work we have a 'sandbox' folder that we do all of our development in. That way when you go to the actual domain name it doesn't show anything (we put a blank index.html file in the folder), but you can go into the sandbox.blah.com to see the progress. You can also do this with a folder inside of the main domain folder.

Wordpress is nice and simple. Joomla and Drupal are also nice to work with. Especially if you are doing global changes to the pages. Typically you can make 1 change to the index file and it propagates to all subsequent pages.

[DarkKnight369]

Just don't launch and incomplete page that is obviously so. Changes and what not should be made offline or via a preview section of the site like the sandbox example. Don't play with live changes on the fly.

[curlydog]

agree buy your domain as soon as one strikes you, however D\develop offline just load WampServer it will give you apache, mysql and php in a tidy little easy to use package for free