Thread:SamwiseFilmore/@comment-25101690-20170429155628/@comment-25101690-20170429220408

I got the wish from relatives to create a business website for them, since I'm into web development and they can't pay a professional web dev company (which costs 4-5 digits of €), and I brainstormed on my options. Now I know that the server and DNS is already supplied (and currently running on Apache), what I asked here is no longer an issue. It also means I won't have to deal with the whole side of server administration etc which is great for me.

I decided to try Ruby on Rails for a start, since Ruby is my favourite language. I spent my evening today installing Ruby, Rails, and an Apache server on my Windows Laptop and I'm currently struggling with getting them all to run together. So far I can do 2, but not all 3. Maybe I don't need Rails after all.

Then I'll take an opensource CMS framework for Ruby. I've already looked for a few options. Of course I'd always like to create my own, but a CMS is already a big chunk of software, and I probably couldn't do it well in any considerable time. In any case, I'll do a bit more coding for required special functionality the CMS doesn't have.

And then there comes the part of frontend development: Designing the style of the website, communicating it with the customer, outlining the raw structure of the website, and a lot of CSS coding. This is the part I'm the least trained in, and CSS can be very tricky, especially with the requirements of responsiveness and good browser compatibility. I will certainly learn a lot from this project.