Hey y'all,
I've been tasked with building a website for my buddy's tattoo business. The website will be pretty simple, mostly just a portfolio of his work, a form to request an appointment, and few other pages. We've talked about potentially implementing an online store to buy his merch down the road. Is WordPress overkill here? I'm new to website development as a whole, and looking for something simple but I'm not sure what the right solution here is.
The biggest and most important thing here is getting his page to show up on Google. We live in a college town so people come and go, and he wants the website to bring in traffic from people who are new to the area. Right now all his marketing happens on Instagram and by word of mouth.
If I go with WordPress, what are some good hosting services? Is Bluehost a good option?
Would the simplicity of something like SquareSpace be worth it here?
WordPress isn’t much for any kind of website.
Even for 1 page website wordpress will be good.
Bluehost is good option
It’s totally open to you which CMS you want to use Squaraspace or WordPress.
But if you ask in WordPress community – of course we all will tell you go for WordPress.
It will have more options to grow website in future and add new features.
WordPress BECAUSE you always want to own your list.
As far as SEO goes, just write a decent index copy and add a few of your best pictures and let time to its thing. Submit a sitemap and wait about a month. The other day, Google indexed a brand new site in just one week but this was a first for me.
When you are done, and google search console is set up, watch what happens and which pages get the most clicks. Tattoo-related blog posts will speed up discovery. So does advertising. 🙂
WordPress has its pros and cons.
If a site is a set-and-forget kind of thing, you could use static HTML (with CSS and JavaScript) and call it a day.
For a site that gets frequent updates and new articles, WordPress makes it a lot easier to work. The main downside of WordPress is that you need to baby sit it (update regularly, but test updates in a staging environment before doing so, worry about security etc.).
Squarespace (and Wix) is basically a WordPress where you don’t worry about updates and security – but you also don’t really own the content, so if the company goes down, you can’t just easily copy your backups and spin it up on another server (it runs on the company’s infrastructure and while migration is possible, technically, it is not very simple and automated AFAIK).
Each of those solutions has its pros and cons.
For hosting – I would avoid BlueHost and other brands owned by [the same corporation](https://io.bikegremlin.com/services/hosting/#1.1).
Relja