About 2500 years ago Lao Tzu said ‘Give a man a fish; feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish; feed him for a lifetime‘. Simple, catchy, and pretty darned obvious even for those of us who aren’t Chinese philosphers. Today I’m going to point you in the right direction to:
- make yourself a great looking and very flexible personal website, for your gites or business in France
- use those new skills to start your own French business making websites for other people
I know very well that both of these skills are very much in demand in France, both among expats with small businesses and locals who want to avoid the excessive prices charged by ‘professional’ website designers.
Why would I share this enormously valuable information? First, because I don’t have time to do other people’s websites myself, but in the course of doing our own I have picked up quite a few useful ideas. Secondly, because I only have time to give pointers, not detailed instructions – to paraphrase another famous quotation, this time by Fermat: ‘I have discovered a truly marvelous idea…but this blog is too small to contain it‘.
Let’s make a cup of tea and get started.
1) Think of a website name, buy that website name, and buy hosting for your website. That sounds easy – mostly because it is easy! As I’ve mentioned before we use (and are happy to recommend) UK Websolutions direct – they are easy to work with, rarely offline, and have an efficient supoort team. Go to their site, click on ‘Web hosting’, then click ‘Order Now’ on HOST-1 (the cheapest option). In the next screen you can choose ‘I would like to register a new domain name with you now‘ and select your website name. All the rest is taken care of for you – just pay up and they will send you a confirmation email with all the information you need.
2) Install Joomla: Log in to your new control panel with the information they have sent you and whizz down to ‘Installatron Applications Installer’. Click on that, then on the next screen choose Joomla – they lead you through the steps necesary but none are in any way complicated. Install it in the ‘main’ site not a subdirectory when given the choice. Why Joomla? It is awesomely clever, completely free, has great support and gazillions of add-on features
3) Learn Joomla: Read the ‘getting started’ tutorials at Joomla – allow a day or two to read, try out their demo system etc. Time spent learning your way around now will save you many hours in the long run. You will get much better support in the forums if you know the basics first because your questions won’t sound so daft.
4) Make it beautiful. There are a few free ‘templates (site designs) that come pre-installed with Joomla, and other free versions are available on the internet. But I highly recommend you stick your hand in your pocket and buy a product called Artisteer – it costs about $130 (£90) but you will pay for just one off-the-shelf template and the Artisteer gives you millions of great ideas and is very easy to use. There is also a free version you can try out first if you don’t believe me.
Unfortunately the Artisteer template designer is such fun to use that a job that should take 30 minutes will end up taking all day, not because it’s hard but just because you are enjoying yourself so much.
5) Add your content (articles about your business) to your website, set up the menus and so on (remember that reading you spent a couple of days on? This is why!) Also add any extras you fancy (there are thousands listed at Joomla extensions, from form generators to calendars to picture galleries and much more besides, mostly free) – the only challenge is to stop yourself adding too many!
6) Look at your new website live on the internet!! Pretty good don’t you think?
This will have taken anything up to four or five days, as it’s your first time, but making changes and updating your own site will now be easy. Time taken to finish the site completely? Sorry, it never happens! Once you realise all the things you can do to change and improve things, and how easy it is, you’ll be forever wanting to tinker.
Much better than that, knocking out great looking websites for other people will be child’s play – and with the great advantage that they won’t realise how easy it was, and will happily pay you well for your efforts. So now you need to…
7) Register as an Auto-Entrepreneur and find customers for your own booming ‘website design in France’ business.
8 ) Sit back, and plan how to spend all that money…of course, if you have too much you can send some to me for having the great idea 
As a clue, you are welcome to admire this Loire Valley site that took me about a morning to put together with some articles that a local writer had sent me (not counting the ‘free holiday rental listings’ part – that took me a bit longer)
And anyone brave enough to give it a go just post your website address in the comments when it’s all finished so we can all take a look – and send some business your way!
Nice suggestion, i’ll tell you when i’m rich LOL
When I looked at joomla a couple of years ago it was too complicated and I didnt understand it at all
do you really think someone not very technical can use it, for there own site?
Sure, joomla now is on version 1.5 which is a great product compared with version 1.0
But…you will still need to spend time reading the manuals first to see how the menus-sections-categories-articles fit together.
I guess if someone is completely non-technical though I can’t say it would be ideal, but probably neither would wordpress.
It is possible to build the site on your own pc or in a hidden subdirectory of your site first while you’re learning then move it across after – moving it does involve a bit more work and techie knowledge though
if my site is going to be based in france do you knwo a french hosting company i should use? or shd i just use a uk one anyway like the one you suggested?
If the site will be in French mainly and you want to score best in google.fr you might be best with a french hosting company, otherwise try and get hosting in the country you are targetting with your site.
A lot of companies offer ‘one click install’ for things like joomla, which helps a lot, and a standard ‘control panel’ also helps which is why we recommend that hosting company. But any will do, just make sure they are installing up to date software – I’m also with a different hosting company that is still installing 2 year old joomla, and old versions of any software (esp wordpress) are very likely to get attacked by hackers. Check before you go ahead if you’re not sure.
I am in the process of setting up a holiday rental website for property in Albania, I have a host and with help from my son we are using Joomla, so I found your site and information very interesting. I wonder if you can point me in the right direction regarding gaining information regarding legal issues involved in setting up a sight like this – insurance etc.
Hi Kate,
Hope it works out, sounds like you are starting on the right foot.
Re legal issues, we don’t enter into any contracts ourselves for accommodation, hotels, car hire etc that are found through francethisway – rather we suggest the best options and people then book direcrtly with companies better placed to offer choices and deal with contracts etc (eg booking.com) and who are ATOL registered etc – if you intend to accept money from people eg payments for car hire, accommodation etc I’m sure the requirements are much more onerous.
Hi!
Thanks for the tips I’m just facing some issues so they will come in handy.
Hi Boris,
Here is our effort after looking at many ideas, including yours.
Being total computer idiots we got a friend to design the site and though it does not have the technical grandure of francethisway.com it seems to reflect the simplicity of our little venture.
Your comments appreciated
Being twixt the Channel and your South West operation, maybe you would consider an exchange of recommended websites ?
http://www.centrefrancevacances.com
Incidentally, it might amuse/ stun you that I use your blog for occasional English conversation lessons . To date, pupils do not seem to show any major signs of stress related disorders.
Best wishes, John
Looking very good John. I love joomla, there’s millions of things you can do with it if you have too much time on your hands – look up ‘joomla extensions’ next time you are bored…
I’ve been redoing all our ‘place’ pages to include photo galleries when possible like this one about Vannes. But I can never stop fiddling so I expect it’ll change again soon.
Glad to hear the blog entries are useful for something even if it’s just to highlight poor use of grammar!
Joomla is a good CMS but it can be off putting to many people starting out. Getting a good hosting provider is one thing for sure, there are a lot of budget providers out there that offer little in the way of php, MySQL support and with non existent after sales service. I’d say get to grips with the basics using a CMS or wysiwyg website editor but as soon as you can, learn some html and css. It opens up a world of design and more importantly, better search engine optimisation. Building a website is the easy bit, getting people to find it on Google, Yahoo etc is the tough part.
It’s certainly true that someone would benefit a lot from spending a couple of days learning the CMS first, and there are various ‘website builders’ available for owners who don’t have the time or inclination to learn. I don’t think I’ve ever asked my hosting company for mysql-php type support, I would always refer to technical forums etc first if I had a problem, so can’t comment on that aspect.
I wonder if it is really necessary to learn CSS, html etc just to build a small website in wordpress or joomla? An advantage perhaps but I think not essential (although I do make a lot of tweaks to the code for francethisway, this blog (in wordpress) is ‘straight out of the box’.
By the way, looked at your site: I learned recently that ‘tag cloud’ and ‘category’ pages should usually have robots – “noindex, follow’ to prevent lots of similar pages being indexed by google creating duplicate content issues.