Back in the old days if you wanted to put up a website for free you would go to one of the free hosts, sign up, use their page designer, add in some cheesy graphics, and you’d have a site. You could also, sometimes, design the site on your own computer (using html) and upload the files to the host.
Your domain name would be something like FreeHosting.com/members/users/YourName and it was an Ok way to go. They would place their ads on your site and you had limited bandwidth and resources, but it was free.
Things are different today. While you still aren’t going to get your domain name for free, and decent hosting costs a few bucks a month, there are some good solutions available, all of which are far superior to what was available in the “old days.”
Note: You won’t want to have your business site on a free system. For that you will want to get a domain name and you will get far more control if you pay some money. Short of that you can have a pretty nice blog or personal or hobby site with these systems and you can make some decent money, if that’s your goal.
Blogger.com and Wordpress.com are two solid choices for building your own blog. They’re both pretty heavy duty systems and both support sites getting a lot of traffic. Both have enough customization features available that you can make your blog your way and it will look pretty darn good.
Blogger puts a bar on top of your site and Wordpress adds a link at the bottom, but everything else is your own. All the adds, content, snippy remarks, etc., are all yours. Blogs are hot these days, the search engines love them, and this is a good way to go to build your own site. No html knowledge is needed.
Weebly.com is a free host, but all they do is put a link on the bottom of your pages, like this: “Create a free website with Weebly.” They have a decent site builder and their system will allow you to make either a traditional “static” site or a blog. It helps to know HTML for Weebly type sites, but it’s not essential.
Squidoo.com is a very cool system. Each page is called a “lens” and each lens consists of a number of modules. Squidoo has dozens of modules allowing you to add cute bits, duels, polls, Amazon and Ebay links, and more. You don’t need to know any HTML here, either, but it helps in spots.
Hubpages.com is very similar to Squidoo in that you can build pages from the various modules available, including Amazon and Ebay stuff.
Both HubPages and Squidoo have a revenue share model, meaning that if you put up Amazon adds on your page then you and the site split the revenue. You can also add your own affiliate links to either.
Squidoo is more friendly to marketers and HubPages is more community oriented, but Squidoo has lots of community stuff and HubPages attracts plenty of marketers. I’ve seen lots more commenting (with interesting comments) and discussion on HubPages than Squidoo, but Squidoo has that stuff, too.
If all you really want is a “Face Page” then consider just going with a Facebook.com (or similar) profile. Zero cost, you can post your stuff, and there are lots of features to build a network or community.
Free hosting on sites such as Geocites.com or Tripod.com is not something I recommend. There are too many restrictions on what you can do and too many ads that aren’t your own. In my opinion all the other solutions mentioned above are better.
These days you can do a lot with a free site. You can have a newsy blog, for free, and constantly update your fans with your insights. If you’re an expert in an area (or want to be one) then put up a Squidoo lens or a HubPage “hub” and let the world know about it. Either way, if you put some work into it then you may be pleasantly surprised at the results.
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Bloging is grate. Bloging is grate lenses are grate and most of the rest. but having your own website and being able to play with it whenever you want too, brings much more satisfaction in my opinion.
If Google decided tomorrow to make something out of nothing and said blogs and such like no longer carry any weight then thousands of blogger and lens masters would be suicidal.
A beginner who really dose want to build a top 3% website with all the flutes and whistles with all the help needed to succeed without knowing anything about building websites and the workings of Would be far better to use Ken Evoy’s Site Build It.
It has all the stuff the big players use without the long learning carve needed.
And at a fraction of the price you would pay for all the tools you need.
And you can turn your site into a blog at will and back again.