Creating a free website

Maverick1984_2

In my opinion,

Installing a version of Wordpress on your own hosted server is a lot better and smarter than using an online service because it's something you 'own'.

Your site will only exist so long as weebly exists, so you don't have much control over it.

Wordpress is brilliant for SEO and Google loves it and ranks wordpress blog sites very highly.

The best thing about hosting your own site is that you can sell it off if you decide not to go forward with it.

Hosted websites are like 'assets' and a domain name's value increases as the site's quality increases. This includes visitors coming to the site, fresh content and conversion.

So yeah, i would advise to go the hosted route. It might cost a around $12 for hosting and a domain, but when considering the pros verses the cons, it's all an investment.

chunter

I'm assuming this is some kind of hobby site.

And to the OP, I assuming HTML and Wordpress are as useless as a burglar breaking into Arsenal FC to steal the silverware.

I would have thought Facebook is the job for this. No learning to be done, just stick the stuff up and switch off the privacy.

Other than that, the drag and drop option looks good. There must be a bundle of those "weebly" and "moonfruit" type sites out there. Just watch out for the sneeky wee costs that they add in..

steve1980

esuhl wrote: »

In most people's, I would have thought. How hard is it to remember how to use a "p" tag, for example? It's not like there are hundreds to remember, and if you have the reference at w3schools.com open in one page, you can create a basic site in a few minutes - much easier than fiddling around with various CMSes to see which one suits.

It's not rocket science, y'know!

It must be wonderful living in your world!

I will quite happily design a site in HTML if a client wants that, but it's taken years of learning, not 5 minutes with a website.

esuhl

steve1980 wrote: »

It must be wonderful living in your world!

I will quite happily design a site in HTML if a client wants that, but it's taken years of learning, not 5 minutes with a website.

I guess it is wonderful in my world! But, surely you haven't spent years learning HTML?! It's so basic!

The fact that you speak of a "client" suggests that you're creating professional websites, which probably require scripting, database connectivity, etc. - things that you can't do in HTML and could well take years to master.

But, seriously... A six-page hobby website of text, links and images could easily be knocked up in a few minutes (if the content is already prepared).

My own website is pure HTML and CSS. For the hell of it, I wrote an application in Excel's VBA that creates .html files by combining templates, text files and spreadsheet content, and that barely took 5 minutes to code! (Okay, it probably took an hour or two - mainly because I don't write programs very often).

steve1980

I suppose it depends on how good the user wants the website to look. If they want a 1970's look with animated gifs stuck here there and everywhere then yes, why not, but using a CMS makes everything so much easier for them and gives them a decent looking website.

charlishae

Thanks everyone for the replies, theres a lot of options i see!

I think Im going to just create a wordpress site for now and then explore other options when I have more time.

Im a little confused about hosting though.. not sure whether to use free hosting or pay for it.. I don't really understand the difference tbh?!

Farway

charlishae wrote: »

Im a little confused about hosting though.. not sure whether to use free hosting or pay for it.. I don't really understand the difference tbh?!

Difference is support when it goes t1ts up

Paid for you get support, paid for in UK even more as they are working same hours as you & not in LA 8 hours behind

Depending on your site & use, do you care if it is off line for 24 hours or not?
If not then free hosting will be fine, you could even use the free space provided by your ISP, but it does really depend upon what your site is for & who it is aimed at

esuhl

charlishae wrote: »

Im a little confused about hosting though.. not sure whether to use free hosting or pay for it.. I don't really understand the difference tbh?!

Farway wrote: »

Difference is support when it goes t1ts up

^^ That's pretty much it. Free services have poor support levels (i.e. you might have to email support queries and wait 24hrs for a reply, rather than getting someone on the phone straight away), but for a hobby/personal site it won't matter too much. You can always change hosts if you have any problems - that might result in a few hours (maybe up to 24 or 48hrs) downtime until the DNS records are updated, but again, you'll probably be fine - just not something you'd want to risk if you have unhappy customers who might move their business elsewhere if your site isn't reliable.

I use zoka.cc for my (free) hosting - you get a fair bit of space, PHP and scripting support, no adverts, etc. The only problems I've had is that I couldn't log in for 2 or 3 days a while back - my site remained accessible, but I couldn't make any changes during that time.

Running_Horse

If I may piggy-back this old discussion:

Found a reasonable priced domain name and web host site for my planned hobby site, but noticed it only allows 10 pages, when I will need about 20.

Is this normal? Any further suggestions to all the above advice?

Thank you in advance.

voucherforit

Yeh, some hosts will do that if you are using their own web page builder. What is the hosting company? If it's normal hosting then you could always install wordpress, say, as suggested above. There would be no limitation on that.