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There are numerous ways to build a website and personally I (now a retired techie) would suggest that WordPress is probably the way to go, it has hundreds of themes to choose from and modern themes will automatically handle mobiles tablets etc. There are numerous plugins for WordPress websites and most are free. Also, if you want to get into the nitty gritty and start custom coding you can.
The big mistake though is to believe that a computer literate techie can handle DESIGN. To design a website needs a different skillset. I have mostly used someone else to produce a design, layout, fonts, colour pallet etc and then I just implement the design. Otherwise, you end up spending hours having to randomly trying different colours, fonts etc to see what looks good.
As well as all this it is worth considering that, even if you have the most wonderful website in the world, it is worthless if no one is looking at it. You need to make sure that you start off on the right foot and consider the site's SEO and how you will market it right from the start.
Good luck.
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I think you friend at the pub is talking about WebAssembly, Don't think it's ready for the big league yet - bit of background from Hanselman...
Net and WebAssembly
MVC is not dead by any means, still going strong.
In the past for small projects I've purchased Bootstrap templates and customised to meet my needs, loads of sites out there, I've used these guys (see link below). Advantage of using bootstrap is if you follow the grid system you can get something that looks good and works well on a desktop browser and a mobile device.
WrapBootstrap
For logos etc I've used designer friends or online bidding sites for example...
99 Designs
If you are using it as a learning exercise then you could go down the route of using Asp.Net core, again you can use MVC etc.
Learning ASP.NET Core
There are a few frameworks out there for single page apps and seem popular in the freelance world. It's up to you if you want to learn them.
Angular
React
Vue
Alternatively, if you don't want to tinker just download a wordpress theme.
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Hi Rob,
I can surely help you in building the website using ASP.NET. Please add me on skype to discuss in detail. My id is "karmicksolutions".
Regards,
Debabrata
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Depending on the site requirements, WordPress may be a candidate. There are plugins for just about anything you need -- the good ones are easily configurable.
Before doing this, get a few books on WordPress, install a practice environment, and play with it. While it's easy to do simple things, it can get complex.
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Consider utilizing a social media platform, especially if the business will have a physical location.
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I'd take a look at Adobe Muse. Last I checked they offered a 30 day evaluation which should be plenty of time to develop a web site. As for hosting the web site I google web hosting, there should be plenty of low cost hosting sites. I'd not try hosting the site at home, you will find that the constant care and feeding of the host computer will be a pain. Much easier to have a cloud solution for hosting that provides backup and support.
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There are some applications (I use Serif Web Plus X8) check that out. If you're talking a web application (I. E. program) you're talking a whole different beast. I've fiddled around with developing applications on the web for years using ASP.Net and stuff like that but I haven't gotten really serious with it, I don't think I have the mental bandwidth any more that it would take to know 40 different frameworks, languages ... yadda, yadda. I still build primarily WinForms applications. Sounds like a web-page builder application (like I said, Serif or "Dream Weaver" or whatever they have nowadays) is your best bet.
-CM
If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you hire an amateur! - Red Adair
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Having done this a few times in the past. I agree to avoid the CMS.
If it is a brochure site. Buy the domain on GoDaddy, and have the wife build the site With WIX.
It gives her full control, they LOOK nice. They Are Decent Brochure sites.
And it takes you out of the picture.
I spent 1 year closing down Joomla sites I had hosted for various people with their hair-brained web site ideas. Seems like an IDEA is NOT sufficient for success... Surprise, it turns out that selling the idea, and getting users, and spending money on marketing, etc. etc. etc. are all important.
I moved 3 of them to WIX and all of them were happy, and felt it was so much easier... And I moved on.
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Rob...
If your wife is planning on an e-commerce site you may want to check out nopCommerce, which is a complete ASP.NET MVC (C#) Open Source tool that is designed for such sites. It also has a variety of themes you can select from and if none of those are too your liking, for a reasonable fee a third-party affiliate will design one for you.
Unless you plan on making significant changes to the site, there is no programming required. However, if you want to make such changes yourself, there is documentation that shows you how to do this.
If your site is going to be a mixture of e-commerce and content management functionality than you may want to consider the CMS, DNN (originally DotNetNuke) for which the Community Edition is still avaailable as a free Open Source download. However, the additional modules you may require are commercially available for reasonable prices.
Most CMSs today are quite bloated and quite finicky to implement. So far, as of my last experience with DNN several years ago, this software still offers a rather straight-forward implementation and easy administration. DNN is also based on ASP.NET MVC (C#).
If you want to build your own, my advice would be to stick with ASP.NET WebForms. In general, WebForms is still far easier to learn and implement than MVC and in my view is still far more powerful than MVC can ever hope to be as a result of the WebForms server-side controls. As to the latter, you can obtain a complete version of Syncfusion's Community Edition Control Suite for all platforms completely free. All you have to do is go to the website and register for your own copy. Syncfusion also provides complete free PDF manuals on a host of development subjects including ASP.NET that you may want to avail yourself of.
Many people will recommend MVC over my suggestion for WebForms. However, if you decide to go that route you will find a morass of tool selections along with a learning curve you may not want to be bothered with.
ASP.NET MVC was popularized as a result of the popular MVC paradigm for Java web development and the maturing Open Source Community, which appears to often prefer complexity over simplicity. Don't ask me why but there is no "right way" to develop for the web as MVC supporters will tell you that MVC is.
If you have any further questions, simply contact me at my email address... 
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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I believe there are a number of services that offer very cheap web site hosting and provide tools to build the front end itself.
And they are responsible for keeping it up and running as well. Which if you build it you would also be responsible for.
Additionally I would suspect that some probably provide shopping cart additions which allow for products (maybe services?) to be ordered from the site and credit cards accepted. And I suspect you are really not going to want to do that yourself (I have done numerous server side implementations of that so I know what is involved.)
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Flashbacks here. Having a similar resume, I was faced with exactly the same situation a few years ago. Although, I didn't want to host it locally. I chose an inexpensive hosting service and used a provided template to create the site thinking that my wife could learn how to manage it easily and take myself out of the picture. It worked nicely for a while until it broke. It was a black box. I couldn't fix it and neither could anyone at the hosting service. After an eloquent verbal assalt on some poor support person and a great deal of agonizing, I decided to do it myself.
I chose all free stuff; PHP, MySql, HTML and Javascript, and borrowed code and useful libraries from various sources on the internet. I learned enough to put the site together and even added an ecommerce section running payments through PayPal. Being a mostly .net programmer, I had a bit to learn, but it's all coding and turned out to be fun and interesting. And, best of all, I was able to teach my wife how to update the database and content. It still breaks every now and then, but it's not a black box and I know the programmer.
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Random comments first, I think the "MVC 'was dead'" comment is funny and completely ridiculous. Whomever told you that is the first person to stop listening too. Second, the compile to JavaScript idea just about as funny. MVC, WebForms and compile to JavaScript are all current and usable technologies.
Now useful advice, I know you said no CMS but this is probably going to be something to reconsider. You need one that is lightweight and easy, that is unless you want to be doing updates all the time. I find when I am asked to do this concept that it involves initial build, hosting and the usual but then continues to need updates on a regular basis. It is a bit the nature of websites to constantly change.
If you really want to stick with no CMS, then I agree with some of the other comments, you need to find something that offers a good, customizable cookie cutter template and use it to build the site. You need to find the easiest way to build something nice and something easy to update. I think somebody mentioned nopCommerce and that may be a good way to go. There are many other systems like them out there. If you do need shopping cart and e-commerce capabilities then you are getting into a whole different mess. Depending on volume and software, you may now have to worry about PCI compliance, so you probably want to use a third party to process payments so you don't have to worry about that type of information. There are a large amount of considerations depending on the site needs. I would lay everything out and make sure to pick the easiest to use and maintain software.
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When we needed a refresh and getting rid of the old CMS site for Lidnug.org, I redid it in about Half a day using this:
Pingendo - Bootstrap 4 builder and editor
It's an easy to use drag and drop editor based around bootstrap 4, and since BS4 can make even the worst dev come designer look pretty good (It's saved my bacon loads of times), it's certainly worth looking at.
Aside from that, if you do want to do some C# coding for it, then you might want to check out using dotnet core 2 and the new SPA templates.
Most of the sites I do these days are created quite simply with:
dotnet new aurelia
That gives me an ASP.NET MVC/WEB API V6 back end, with Aurelia (http://aurelia.io) and Typescript handling the front end.
Everything you need is baked into the front-end framework from DI to WebComponents, and it's all really clean coding. Beacuse your using TypeScript the front end code is massively similar to C#, with everything from Classes right through to Generics.
Iv'e presented at several User Groups and .NET conferences over here in the UK on the subject of how good using TypeScript is for C# back-end devs (Ping me if you want a copy of my slide deck), so if your a C# junkie then TypeScript is without doubt the best way to go IMHO, Aurelia is really super easy to get to grips with unlike the big behemoths like Angular and all the rest, and dotnet core w/MVC is just so nimble and quick..... DAMN QUICK in fact.... so quick, it sucked me back into regular MVC after 4 years of using NancyFX (I got disheartened with the slug that MVC 3/4/5 became).
Oh and cause it's DN Core, it's fully cross platform too. I routinely develop on Windows, submit to git, and auto deploy to Ubuntu/Linux servers without even thinking about it, there's an article on the deployment process om my shawtyds wordpress blog if your interested in that aspect.
I'd start with Pinguendo however, build something static, then drop that static into a dotnet core aurelia app and take it from there...
Just my 2 cents 
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Peter - thanks for the info, there some really good pointers in there. Unfortunately I haven't been able to move forward with this at all since I wrote this due to time pressures of other things.
Reading around though, it seems like Bootstrap seems to be a popular choice (mostly v3 from what I've seen) so I look forward to trying out Pingendo.
Also, what you wrote about TypeScript sounds interesting. I think I'll try what you suggest (donet new Aurelia) but there's going to be quite a bit of new stuff for me to get my head around.
Thanks again.
Regards,
Rob Philpott.
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No problems Rob. Am Happy to Help.
You may be interested to know I wrote A Book on Bootstrap 3 (Shameless Plug I know...) It's in the Syncfusion Succinctly ebook series and free to download from their site (There's a quick link to it and others from my blog)
If you hold on a week or so, I have a new post that I'm hoping to get finished for my blog that will be designed to get a newcommer up and running in as little time as possible with Aurelia and C# using dotnet core.
Lastly, I'm in the final stages of finishing the followup to my Bootstrap 3 book, covering bootstrap 4, which I'm hoping to get done by end of December ready for SF to publish it in the new year.
Of course like you, time pressures are always present, and whats outlined above is the "Nirvana plan"
Feel free to ping me on Twitter as @shawty_ds if you want to ask anything.
Shawty
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Meet Alma, a 12-year old musical genius: [^].
Warning: her beauty and joie de vivre may make even old crocodiles (like me) shed a tear.
«While I complain of being able to see only a shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is now, since I'm not at a stage of development where I'm capable of seeing it.» Claude Levi-Strauss (Tristes Tropiques, 1955)
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Oh my god. Speechless. Thank you for the link.
If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. — Lyall Watson
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That should be required reading for the scores of well-meaning but deluded parents who bark at teachers and students alike when little Johnny doesn't reach the dizzy heights of stardom after 2 years of lessons. I think nowhere in the field of human endeavour is the concept of raw talent as something you're just given, and that you can't learn or compensate for with hard work, more keenly demonstrated than in classical music, in particular composition. Some people just walk around all the time with melodies flying out of their heads, it's true...
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.
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Mel Padden wrote: That should be required reading for the scores of well-meaning but deluded parents
The question is in whose interest those kind of parents are well-meaning..
If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. — Lyall Watson
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" I don't really know, but it's really very normal to me to go around -- walk around and having melodies popping into my head. It's the most normal thing in the world. For me, it's strange to walk around and not to have melodies popping into my head. "
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Got fed up with the US style advert every 40 seconds and binned it.
Shame, it might have been good.
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Ha, that is just like Linux!
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Works sweet, nice tip. Thanks!
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I was able to predict that you were the author of this post, strictly by the verbiage in your thread title (not seeing your screen handle), from the home page.
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