Someone I know has asked me to make them a simple static website after they saw my portfolio. They don’t need the site for marketing purposes or anything, they mostly want it just so it is there for the company and to be able to post events that are held once or twice a week. I want it to be a custom built website where I use figma to design it and html and css to code it purely as experience and to better my chances of employability. I need them to be able to edit certain parts of a page so they can replace pictures and content to update the upcoming events without changing anything else to the site ensuring it still looks the same when people look at my past work. How do I achieve this?
I’ve been researching and trying to plan how to do it along with the whole hosting the site, which after spending nearly all my hours outside of work because I had/have no idea how to do it. My plan was to have them create an account on netlify and host it on there using the netlify drop function as they wont have github. After that a headless cms sounded like what I needed, and surreal cms from all the ones I looked into sounded like the only one you could control what clients could edit in the site (I may be wrong), so I was going to implement that however it doesn’t work with netlify. I’m trying to install netlify cms to test that but its a lot more complicated than I was expecting and I’ll probably test a few others like contentful out first. Does anyone have any ideas? I don’t want to spend all my time on this if there’s a simpler way. But if I have got the right idea, at least with my ability and limited experience at the moment, if someone could point me in the right direction I’d really appreciate it.
I’m a bit through the javascript curriculum but basically only know html and css. Sorry for the long post.
A basic Wordpress site would do the trick here if they are looking for control on updating the content - I’m pretty sure without knowledge of Wordpress you’d not be able to build a custom theme but you could buy a cheap or get a free theme and customise some of the css.
For this you would just need a Linux hosting package that runs php - you can even get hosting specially for Wordpress installs and the hosting company can provide some basic support to get it going.
Does the customer have a domain name already? If so where is it currently registered ie GoDaddy etc?
After trying out contentful I decided to go with that. I can build a web page with html and css, deploy it on netlify and then set up the headless cms. With that I can have the client create an account, add them as a team member and give them permission to edit the content of the events page and change the image but nothing else.
That’s sensible – keep it as simple as possible. One thing that you should always try to do is restrict how much your client can customise things: the less the better. The more you allow, the more difficult it becomes to code, the complex it becomes, and so on. Keep it simple.
Also, while you’re getting to grips with Contentful and getting something working, build them the design in Figma, and build out a completely static version of the site. Just the HTML structure, doesn’t need styling until they OK the design – this should be quick to do, as you’re just roughing out structure, but it’s informed by the design and the design informs the structure. That way you have something you can plug into Contentful to make sure things work while they’re concerned with going over the design and checking things look the way they want. Then you can style your [now-functional] site.