Can anyone share with their experience? I want to make my own blog about jewerly and other stylish accessories but I don't have any professional skills for web building. Is it possible for such complete beginner to make a nice site with pleasant design? What tools and methods can you recommend me? Thanks!
These days, if one is reasonably computer literate, it isn’t too difficult to design a serviceable website using a template. I personally like Nexus Themes,(nexusthemes.com) which is a simple drag-and-drop theme that installs on top of Wordpress. It’s a bit of money ($65 I think) but so simplifies the process that I find it worthwhile. There are also a bunch of free Wordpress themes on Wordpress.com and I believe they have a completely free plan. Not as easy as Nexus, but easy enough if you watch some tutorials.
In addition to what Chip said, if you don't need the website to do anything that complicated, Weebly (weebly.com) is a pretty simple and free website building tool that works well for basic pages. It only took me like one hour to set up a nice looking recruitment website there for a group I run in an online game. Currently, three years later without touching the site at all, I still get emails of people asking to join through the contact box on the website, so I guess Weebly does a good job advertising their sites too.
Actually, I th8nk Weebly might be a better and much simpler option in this case. I’d forgotten about it, but I know several folks who use it and last be it. Most of the stuff I work with tends to have some pretty specific and demanding needs, so Wordpress or similar tools are my go-to, but services like Weebly have done a great job of making the web accessible in a simple, inexpensive (or free) way.
Wix is another good tool that is fairly easy to use. They have an ADI option which allows you to describe what kind of website you want, and then it generates a template for you (which you can alter if you don't like it). You can also pick your own template if you so desire. Personally I tend to use either WordPress or Wix when building websites, but I have also used Weebly before. All three will allow you to do most things for free, but you may have to upgrade to a paid subscription if you want to include certain options (such as including a landing-page on WordPress). I usually use the free version, but I once had to upgrade to the paid version on WordPress, because I was building a website for a company and they were adamant that they wanted a landing page (basically a pop up that shows up, often with a picture, a brief description/ introductory tagline of the website, and a button to "Go to the homepage", or another option such as "Subscribe"). WordPress is good because they recently added an option where you can choose how confident you are in building a website, and can select whether you want to use "Easy" or "Advanced" mode. "Easy mode" offers step-by-step instructions, tells you were all the options are, and what they do, so it's good for if you are new to this kind of thing. I tend to use "Advanced" mode because I know the program quite well, and it's more flexible, but if you're just starting out and haven't had much experience with making websites before than I would suggest either "Easy mode" on WordPress or using Wix. However, Weebly is also a valid option. Just try a few of them and see what works for you. I hope your blog goes well.
