create a homepage

thisuseridistakenagain

don't bother with all the designing or paying stuff to start out with - you can get a free website at webs.com - and you don't need to know anything about techy stuff!!

metalfrogstudios73

There are many companies/people out there who will prey on you to get more money out of you. Yes, you can get free web software etc. but I can tell you, with over 16 years website and search engine marketing experience, that the site you get free will not get you any business. One previous writer suggested word press, which could be an alternative. However, you need to realise that word press is primarily a blogging system and doesn't really cut it as a web page.

You have to decide what you want your website to do. If you simply want to guide people to it and then have them make contact with you, then please stick to to the bare minimum and focus on design and put development skills to the back burner (if you are going to try to do this yourself).

If, however, you want traffic to come through people searching for your terms then you need to ensure that the site is well designed, well developed, has clean coding in it, and is absolutely of the best possible quality for the search engines to want to visit and index your site.

There are no quick fixes to this, and beware of people telling you that your site will be page one on Google in week. This NEVER happens. However, with the right advice and support, you can do some good work and get the search engines to notice your site.

I would advise against off the shelf web design packages, or even free ones as they are never clean> MS Front page is a definite no-no in web speak. Microsoft code is injected in to the site when built in FP , and this can cause all sorts of issues on the styling of the site.

Two ports of call, for inspiration and to get some free downloads are buy a book on HTML 5 and CSS (style sheets), and go to oswd.org, where you can see work which people have created and allow you to download providing you do not use the designs commercially - unless the right credits are given. Normally these sites are "clean" coded and may inspire as I said.

Finally, hosting is now an important factor in the process. If you believe that you are going to get volume traffic to your site you need to consider your hosting strategy carefully. However, even if you are not going to get volume, Google now takes in to account the speed of the server and will rank your site higher on indexes as one of the factor of getting your site higher. Beware - cheap hosting is not a good alternative for a website for business. Normally you will find if you pay a tenner a year for hosting you will be on a server with thousands of other sites, all sharing your bandwidth, which in layman's terms means that the more sites on the server with you the slower your site becomes and the worse the user experience is.

If you would like any more free advice then please get in touch, or look at the advice section on our website. If not, good luck.