Create a Free Web Site

There are numerous places on the web which offer free space for web sites. Many of these also offer easy to use tools and templates for creating a web site as well as many free ad ons such as guest books, counters and so on. With a free web site you usually have reasonable, but limited space, restrictions on advertising and low limits on the number of add ons you can use for free. These places also offer premium hosting and services in which you can receive more space, greater number of add ons and are allowed to sell advertising and other products.

I have developed websites using Yahoo, Bravenet and GoDaddy. Of the three, I prefer Bravenet for reasons that I will describe below. GoDaddy has great deals on domain names but its hosting is limited and they charge for tools (but do refer you to sites with free tools that will work). With free hosting sites you register as a user and your user name in combination with the host name becomes your domain name. With GoDaddy I purchased the domain name http://chucknugent.com and that is the URL address of my website. For Bravenet I selected the user name no free lunch and my URL address on that site is http://nofreelunch.bravehost.com. On Yahoo my user name is userdes1947 and my URL address for that site is http://www.geocities.com/userdes1947/

Yahoo doesn't allow you to use free sites for commercial purposes, you have to upgrade to a premium account for that. However, their other features are very good, except that their site building tool is very slow and often times out when using a dial up connection. However, it works great with high speed connections.

Bravenet not only offers a wider variety of tools and add ons, but also allows some commercial activities even going so far as to providing lists of affiliates which you can link to in order to generate revenue.

However, before you create a web site you should give some thought to what your purpose is and how you want it to look. A website can be a simple personal home page in which you introduce yourself and tell who you are. It can be something you set up to assist and promote an organization you are affiliated with such as a church, homeowners association or other group. If you do decide to set up such a site be sure to make sure others in the group agree to your doing this. If you are passionate about something you can build a website around your passion and share it with the world.

Whatever, you decide as the theme for your website, keep two things in mind.

First, you have to provide content that entertains, provides useful information or helps people in some way. People are not going to visit your website unless they feel that they can benefit from visiting it. So, unless you simply want to have a web site but do not care about visitors, think about how you are going to design it in a way that will attract visitors.

Second, remember that a website is open to the world and web users will know you by your website. This is reputation issue and there are some college users of sites like MySpace and FaceBook who are having difficulty finding jobs because potential employers are including web searches in their background checks and excluding these students because of the bizarre things that they have said about themselves on the web.

So, give it some thought and, once you have an idea as to what you want your website to look like, select a hosting service you are comfortable with and build that site.