Try Before You Buy
We always encourage our clients to try something before they buy it. There are some free resources out there for you to try out to get feel for how your website might look like and some of the things you will need to decide before you ask us to create one for you. There are limitations to all free services so we really wouldn’t recommend them for a business website as you will need your own domain to be considered a professional in any field. We suggest you try some of them for personal websites for your friends and family. Most of these have built in templates for you to choose from, helpful tutorials and other services depending on which one you choose.
The easiest website creation services has to be www.webs.com. It use to be named Freewebs. They offer free websites for personal use with 300 templates, easy to use page editor, you can upload pictures and videos however there are limited space so you cannot upload a lot of pictures and you will not have your own domain. You should choose your user name carefully as this will be part of your domain that you are given. The free sites have advertising to offset their costs. If you want more space, shopping carts, your own domain and to stop the advertising you will have to pay a yearly free. But try out the free stuff first to see if this is really what you want to do.
The other things you might want to consider doing is joining FACEBOOK and/or TWITTER. These are community or social media websites that allow you to collect friends, update those who have joined you and much more. These are both addictive and may even detract you from other things so read their FAQ section and speak to friends and relatives to see if they have found these services to be helpful. These are communities of people from all over the world and more and more businesses are using them to keep their customers informed.
The last thing you might want to try is getting a blog started. Yes, we can add a blog page to your website but if you try one of these free services you can get some practice in before you have one professionally created. There are two free blog services that I use for my family and friends. The first is Blogger. com and the other is Posterous.com. The Blogger website offers a free blog and is owned by Google now. They require that you sign-up for a google account and/or a gmail email account. You get a domain based on your user id to send a link to your friends. They do have a limited amount of templates to choose from and you can add up to 10 stand-alone pages. Posterous is a new service for us. A friend recommended it to me and so far it seems to be working fine. There are limits as to the color schemes or templates but they do offer the ability to post to your facebook account as well as a few other social websites. You can even post to your blog using some email accounts such as gmail, yahoo, hotmail and aol.