Free Web Hosting Sites!

Have you ever wanted YOUR OWN WEBSITE? Well, today is your lucky day! (Or tomorrow is depending on when you make it.) In the process of finding a free web hosting site for my website, www.theparkinggarage.webs.com, I found a number of great sites that do what seems to be the same thing - give you free hosting for a website you can customize to every last period. However, I have tried two different free web hosting sites, and have gfound that now all are created equally.

Now, I did have certain criteria for my awesome website I was going to make. I wanted my own domain name dot the hosts name dot com. I didn't want it to be MySpacey with a host name dot com slash my dustom name. This, for example, ruled out wix.com. The adress would have been wix.com/yourname.

I also wanted a super customizable website that I could change the layout, tabs, pictures, blog, what have you. Wetpaint.com has a dozen or so templates to chose from, but webs.com has over 300 templates! Also, my friend John (johnb0127 on HubPages), had created his website through webs.com and it was awesome! John's site is www.johnburgdorf.webs.com.

And last, I wanted it to be completely and totally free. So this ruled out places such as godaddy.com and bluehost.com. Webs.com, wetpaint.com, wix.com, and bravenet.com were all - or had an option of a - free web hosting sites. First I tried webs.com.

Webs.com - Grow a Site. Grow a Community

In my opinion, this is the best free web hosting site out there. Over 300 templates, fully customizable tabs, 100% free, free, built-in traffic meter, blog, photos, video, and the only adition to your site adress is ".webs"! You new site comes with a home page, a blog page, a guestbook, a members tab, photos, video, and games. Of course, you don't have to keep all of those pages. You can add and delete as many pages as you deem nesesarry. Add tabs on your site for anything you like! Guitars, cars, books, video games, etc. You can even have a free store with up to 5 items in it! Rename the home page, blog page and more! The games page comes with Pac Man on it, and you can add aas many games and widgets as you care to have on there! I added a virtual piano to mine, hangman, and more.

When you are thinking of domain names for a regular website, you have to be really creative! With webs, you can just type in desired-name.webs.com, and see if it takes you to a site. If not it will take you to webs.com and say page not found.

I linked my webs site to Google AdSense and put Google Ads on every tab. The way you do this, if you have an AdSense account, is you click on AdSense Setup. From there, click on the first option, AdSense for Content. Doing this, you can create custom text ads to match the color scheme of your website. There is an option for text ads only, picture ads, and a combo. I perfer the text only option, as I think the picture ones look cheesy and unattractive sometimes. Then you just link you site into AdSense and you are ready to get paid for ad clicks!

The buitl-in traffic counter is a little confusing at first, but you get the hang of it after a day or two. It shows you what time the visitors came, where in the world they were right down to the city, and see what website they got to your site by (i.e. facebook.com) Pretty cool feature that is 100% free! And it sets itself up in mere seconds with the click of the mouse!

Do you have more than one email adress? Create one webs website per email!

Visit my webs site at www.theparkinggarage.webs.com! You will find reviews on guitars, video games, stuff about my guitars and what I am interested in. You can also see a few of my best hubs from here on HubPages.

Wetpaint.com - Where Superfans are Superstars

I believe the idea of wetpaint sites is that anyone you say can edit it, can edit it. I chose not to do this (there is an option where only you can edit the site). The templates were very limited and each one looked very much like the one next to it. Most of them are either black or white with some sort of color design at the top. Once you chose one you like though, you can get started building your site.

Personally, I thought the site looked very messy and confusing, but it still looks like an average cheap website. You can add tabs to your site, but they appear on the left side of the screen under Home - Not across the top of your site with Home, Discucssions, Photos, Videos, News, Updates, etc. I was also dissapointed that you couldn't rename the tabs across the top.

I mentioned earlier that I added Ads By Google and AdSense to my webs site, but I did not see this as a possbility on wetpaint. On webs there was a button so that you could insert HTML codes for things such as Gooagle Ads, but there was not one to be found here.

Perhaps if there was more traffic on this site, and if I chose the option of letting anyone edit the site it would be more enjoyable. It was purely for an experiment purposes only. If you are looking for a website that has just a couple pictures, maybe a blog and a story about you or your organization, then Webs wins again. There are way too many things going on on a Wetpaint site, that a site that just wants to give a couple facts about a person, program, or organization, would just be confusing and a pain to visit.

Sorry, Wetpaint.com, not loving it so much.

Wix.com - Free Flash Website Builder

I knocked this one out of my competition right when I the adress would have been wix.com/so_and_so, NOT so_and_so.wix.com. It seemed to much like a profile on another website to me. Well I discovered that they also do MySpace layouts. So that is probably why the adress was like that. Also, when trying to look at example websites created using Wix - which I did multiple times I might add - I noticed that it is an unreasonably slow loading website. Not for me. I wanted something that loaded fast and was a breeze to use.

I will say, that the example (I say example, but they were actually sites created using Wix and they were using them for good examples) websites were very impressive looking. There were different options for layouts like Business and Personal, MySpace, Art & Music, and option to have a Wix person design it for you.

So if you don't care so much about the URL - just so you can put it on a business card, Facebook or tell someone what it is easily - then I'd seriously consider Wix! The sites looked very clean and professional.

Bravenet.com - Free Websites and Web Tools

This site confused me. There are two options on the screen - one being Bravehost, the other being Viviti.

Bravehost said to have a classic hosting panel with FTP access, PHP access, site manager, domain management, emails, and databases. There are also options for a free site, or to pay for a better one.

Viviti is apparently the latest in website construction from bravenet.com. It features a drag and drop editor and you can manage online utilities with it. It also says there are 100's of themes, free and pro levels, drag & drop editor, you can sell products using PayPal accounts, blogs, maps and widgets, and finaly no coding required.

I say, if you feel you can figure it out, then I would go for it. It sounds to me like Viviti is better than Bravehost. At least, I would go with Viviti.

If you use either Bravenet or Wix, please tell me. I would love to hear what they are like.

Thanks,

Parker

www.theparkinggarage.webs.com