Make Your Own Website
Looking to make your own website? Suffering from information
overload?
We summarize the options available to you in order to make your own website. It largely depends on your purpose, on your experience level, and on your budget.
Purpose Of Your Website
What’s the purpose of your website? Are we talking a full blown e-commerce site taking credit card orders and shipping product to customers? Are we talking about a simpler affiliate website selling information products? Alternatively, just a simple website to show your family photos to your friends?
Family Photo Sharing Site
The best option in this case is to look at the free photo sharing sites that are available. The top 5 are (in our order of preference):
Personal Website or Blog
If we are talking about a family or personal website then we recommend you try out some of the free web hosting services. You have two options, you can write a Blog (journal or diary format), or have a fixed page format that won’t change over time. Below are our top recommendations.
Free Blog Websites
www.blogger.com (owned by google)
The advantages of blogs is that tend to be ranked higher in the search engines than other static sites. So you’re likely to get a lot more traffic naturally without too much promotion on your part.
Free Static Websites
smallbusiness.officelive.com (Microsoft – not likely to close down)
www.google.com/sites (Google – not likely to close down)
www.webs.com (nice looking professional domain name)
The advantage of free websites is that they allow you to learn about what is involved in building a website, without incurring any cost on your part. The free sites all have WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web interfaces which mean you don’t have to learn about HTML, CSS and other web languages. It’s just like using Microsoft word to write a document. Later, if you still want to learn about HTML some of these services still give you this option.
The disadvantage of free websites is that you have little control. For example, the yahoo offering for static free websites (geocities.yahoo.com) closed down recently. Imagine if you had your website hosted there? A lot of free services also place advertisements on your websites, so they don’t don’t professional – this is how they can still make money by offering the service for free – from the advertising revenue.
Hosting You Own Website
This is the best option if you want to look professional. For example, you might want to register your own brand to enable people to “look you up” e.g. fredsmith.com or mummyblogger.com. Some of the free static website services we mentioned above do offer this as a paid-for upgrade. However, there is a lot more to making business website than registering a domain name e.g. there is getting traffic to your site, converting that traffic into sales and taking orders.
Your Experience Level
If he terms ftp, domain name, html and web hosting mean nothing to you, or you plan to build a business website then we advise you to take a look at the sitebuildit program. Why? Because in this case you will need a complete website building education and a system to follow to succeed – not just a website. Sitebuildit* cover everything: domain registration,
getting website visitors (traffic), converting that traffic to buyers, taking customer orders, and customer support. We got our initial website building education from sitebuildit. Even though have since moved on to our own webhosting, we still recommend sitebuildit* to make your own website if you are an absolute beginner with no knowledge of domains, ftp and hosting.
* We would like to disclose fully that we do receive a commission from all sales
of Site Build It from this site.
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