Examing Free Do It Yourself Website Design

18. October 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Website Designs · Tags: , , , ,

Design it yourself websites are becoming increasingly popular. It is estimated that thousands of businesses use a build it yourself website builder each week. There are many benefits and many drawbacks to designing your own website. If done properly your website has a chance for a decent search engine ranking. If done poorly your website will never get the recognition it deserves and potential customers will not be able to find your business. If customers can’t find you on the internet, your website is as valuable as the price you paid for it. So if you choose to design your own business website, do plenty of homework and plan on investing a lot of time in the designing, development, marketing, and maintenance of your website.

Free “Do it Yourself” Websites The Good & The Bad

There are hundreds, if not thousands of companies on the internet that are offering low cost websites that you can build yourself. Essentially what they are offering you is a platform and then send you off and running into the great world of website design. Choosing if this option is right for you can end up hurting your business more than helping it if you make the wrong decision. A simple sentence or overuse of keywords can quickly get your website banned from top search engines. Imagine how little traffic your website would get if your potential customers could not even find you on the internet. If you are the least bit nervous or skeptical about building your website it may be best for you to hire a website designer. If my car blew an engine I might be tempted to work on it myself, but the better result is going to be for me to take that car to the mechanic because that is their specialty. The bottom line is if you feel comfortable building your own website you should make a stab at it. However, for the majority of business owners it is best to hire a website designer.

Having Your Website Published On The Internet Is Not Free

While the platform to design your website is free, there are still multiple costs of the do it yourself packages. First and most commonly are the website hosting fees. It is free to design your website, but acutally making it live on the internet involves website hosting, which doesn’t apply to the free website design offer. You can expect to pay anywhere from $10 to upwards of $30 a month for the hosting of your website. So while you may be saving a few hundred dollars up-front by not hiring a website designer, you are still paying for your so called free website package.

Know How To Market A Build it Yourself Website

Now that you have designed your free website the next step is to market the website. There was a famous quote in the movie Field of Dreams “If you build it, they will come”, that is not true with website design. If this were 20 years ago, that quote might apply. However, now in 2010 there are millions of websites out there and thousands of them are going to be competing with you for search engine rankings. A search engine ranking is what number the search engine ranks your website. The goal for any new website would be to have a ranking in the top 100 results, which would put you on one of the first ten pages of search engine results. If your website is ranking past page 10, the chances of potential customers finding your website are slim to none. What free website design packages do not offer you is the best way to market your website. For someone who is not familiar with search engine optimization, keyword marketing, meta tags, or content analysis, then chances are your site will be one of the other thousands of websites in your industry that are not ranking in the top 100 results. You may have designed one of the most professional looking sites offered by a free website template design company, but not having a way for your customers to find you could cost you the loss or closure of your business.

Professional Website Design Is More Affordable Than Ever

Hiring a website designer to professionally design your website can run you as little as a few hundred dollars. This is a one time fee to have a professional website custom designed to your business with keyword analysis, search engine optimization, and attention to search engine attractive content. My company, The Website Shack, offers complete custom designed websites for a few hundred dollars and offers one for the most reliable and lowest priced website hosting services in the industry. The benefit of hiring a website designer is that we are trained in building websites to succeed in the search engine rankings. This is our area of specialty whether you have a plumbing business or a dental practice. The professional design and marketing of your website will provide your business with the highest level of visibility, and the ultimate increased success of your business. It wasn’t too long ago that companies were charging thousands to have their business website designed. This is an area that was not impacted by inflation, because higher quality designed websites are now available for custom design for just a one time fee of a few hundred dollars. Every day more and more of us are throwing away our paper telephone books and using the internet to resource companies and products. Having your business listed on the internet, regardless of your location or industry could be the only exposure your business gets to potential customers.

Decide What Is Best For You and Your Business

If you are looking to simply have a web presence for your business where quality of design and search engine rankings, then a design it yourself website may be the route for you to go. As we discussed with monthly hosting fees after your free design, there is nothing really free about a free website builder. Hiring a web designer for a few hundred dollars will give your site a more professional look and increased search engine visibility for your business. Also consider hiring a company for your search engine optimization and local internet marketing of you design your own website.

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How To Build A Website For Free

07. September 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Build a Website · Tags: , ,

Do you have a story to share? Do you want to make money online? Do you want to communicate with other people online? If your answer is yes to any of these questions, then you need to have your own website. Why? That’s because with a website, you can easily share information and stories to other web surfers through blogs. You can even sell products your business offers online. You can talk to others about any topic through forums. You can do all these things by having your own website and best of all you can do it for free. How can you build a website for free? Here’s how.

Through other websites, you can build your own website for free! Websites like webs.com and weebly.com offer free web site building tools and free website hosting for your own website. Just go to their website and sign up and you’ll instantly get the ability to build a website for free. But before signing up, you must know what features these kinds of websites offer for you. You need to know the features so you can decide which of the many websites that offer free website building you should use.

Weebly.com offers several features that many people can take advantage of. First of all, you can choose a website design from their professionally designed template. This is perfect for people who are finding it hard to create their website’s layout. Furthermore, you have the ability to customize the templates to your own taste. You can change the layout’s theme color and such. Adding content on your website such as text, photos and videos is also very easy on weebly.com because you can use their drag and drop website editor to put such contents in your website. All you have to do is to simply drag and drop the contents in your website. And unlike other free website building services, weebly.com lets you disable the advertisements so that you no longer need to save space for unnecessary advertisements.

Webs.com’s free web building services is also feature-rich. With it, you can also choose a design from their growing number of templates. And with a site designer, you can edit the template’s background colors and even add logos and the like. Their Page Editor is also easy to use. You can easily add text, change font size and color, create tables and such with the editor. The editor works like MS Word so if you know how to use it, using the page editor should be a breeze. There’s also a calendar feature that lets you add events so to that your visitors can know what, when and where event will happen. You can also add any kinds of widgets, such as polls and news feeds on your website. Webs.com also offers payment collection via Google Checkout or PayPal so that you can start selling your products online.

These two websites offer a lot of features that you would need to build a website for free. Choose any of these websites and start making the website you want.

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Internet Guide : How to Build a Website for Free

05. August 2010 · 25 comments · Categories: Build a Website · Tags: , , , ,


In order to build a Web site for free, download an Web site design program such as the Yahoo! Site Builder, which is a very simple HTML site that directs users through the construction of a home page. Other sites such as templatemonstser.com provide low cost assistance for beginning Web site builders. Find out how to save money when building a Web site in this free video tutorial on setting up a home page from an Internet professional. Expert: Michael Burton Contact: www.reel-entertainment.com Bio: Michael Burton has over 12 years of experience with PC computers. Filmmaker: Michael Burton

Internet Guide : How to Build a Website for Free

05. August 2010 · 25 comments · Categories: Build a Website · Tags: , , , ,


In order to build a Web site for free, download an Web site design program such as the Yahoo! Site Builder, which is a very simple HTML site that directs users through the construction of a home page. Other sites such as templatemonstser.com provide low cost assistance for beginning Web site builders. Find out how to save money when building a Web site in this free video tutorial on setting up a home page from an Internet professional. Expert: Michael Burton Contact: www.reel-entertainment.com Bio: Michael Burton has over 12 years of experience with PC computers. Filmmaker: Michael Burton

Get to Build Free Websites on the Internet Now

04. August 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Build a Website · Tags: , , ,

Do you have something that you want to share? Are you trying to make money online with your own website? Are you finding ways on how you can possibly build your own website for free? With your own personal website, you get to practically put up anything and it is entirely up to you on how you want to monetize your website. Setting up and building your own page is not a complicated task. In fact, here are ways on how you can build a website for free.

There are many web services online that offers free website building tools and website hosting. For sites like Webs.com and Weebly.com, all you need is to sign up for a free account and you will instantly be able to begin building your own website. Here are some of the listed features that you may take advantage on when you are building a free web site.

From Weebly.com, you get to pick from several of their professional designed website templates. Not only will you need to go through a hard time figuring out on ways to design your website layout, you even get to customize each of their specific templates to suit your own preference. Adding contents with Weebly.com is very easy as you basically get to utilize their drag-and-drop website feature which enables you to upload contents such as pictures, texts or videos effectively. The greatest feature offered at Weebly.com when you opt to build your website for free with it is that you get to disable unrelated advertisement.

For Webs.com instead, you get to pick from their ever growing designed templates to apply to your website. Their page editor works just like Microsoft Office Word. Therefore if you are familiar with that application, then working around with their featured page editor to build your own website should be a breeze for you. You get to optimize your website with useful widgets such as calendar, polls and news feed. Webs.com is great as it also offers payment collection using Google Checkout or Paypal. Therefore, building a free website for trading is essentially useful with Webs.com.

These two listed web sites are just some of the many web based services that offers a free website building. You can start picking any of the two and begin creating your own for free.

 

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How to Build Free Websites

15. May 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Build a Website · Tags: , ,

If you have few web design skills or none whatsoever and want create an online presence, website templates are perhaps the best option for you. There are many services offering professional-quality website templates for free, enabling you to build your own, fully-functional site in just a few minutes.

In most cases, these free templates have been designed by highly experienced professionals who appreciate the fact that users may want a design that is so easy to use, that all they would need to do is to drag and drop the elements to build their own free website. Essential tasks, such as the coding, design and layout are all taken care of, allowing users to concentrate on putting together an easy-to- edit, professional-looking website with no need to learn any complicated computer programming language.

With free website templates, all you have to do is to select a theme, choose a name for your site, add your logo,  input your images and text and make your new website live. Yes, it’s that simple! A beautifully designed, professional-quality and easily navigable website, using free templates can take as little as five minutes. It doesn’t matter whether you’re hoping to build a website as an individual, a small business or a commercial enterprise, as long as you can customize a free website template, you’ll be able to get online and start receiving visitors or customers within a short time.

As web templates are fully tested by experienced web designers before they’re offered to the general public, the chances of ending up with software bugs or errors in the computer code are very small. This would be a great benefit to anyone with no experience of HTML, PHP, CSS or any other programming language.

The alternative to creating a website using a template is to get a professional designer to build one for you or to do it yourself. However, there will be cost or time considerations with either option. Some professionals may charge you hundreds or even thousands for a bespoke design, depending on the complexity of the website. A do-it-yourself approach by an inexperienced web designer could lead to a range of problems, including having the menu appear on the  wrong side of the page or the site not appearing online at all after supposedly publishing it to the internet!

With web templates, you can see from the very beginning what your page will look like, plus there are thousands of varied layouts to choose from. Furthermore, if you want to modify a template design, it is easy to do, without the need to ask for someone else’s help. Web templates also help you to appreciate some of the design and layout techniques in a professional website, with the potential for you to perhaps consider going on a  training course in the future.

Despite the instant appeal of free website templates, one thing to bear in mind is that they will not be personal to you. The basic design and layout of a template is highly likely to be accessible by other people, so there’s a real possibility that someone else may choose the same website template design as you. That said, a good website template, whether free or paid-for, will be flexible enough for you to easily rearrange or add features to make the site unique. With some website template packages, you have the potential to create literally tens of thousands of design combinations!

Website templates are the perfect solution for people who have no web design experience or who can’t afford to pay a professional designer to build a site for them. Even if you do have a little experience in web design, choosing a website template could be a great opportunity to showcase your creative skills by customizing it to create a content-rich and user-friendly website with the potential to attract many thousands of visitors…/

About the Author:


The author writes articles on free website. For more information about web design, create websites, hosting, templates and sitemaker, new launch, web pages made easy can be found on the net.

Part 3 of your Free Guide to Building a Website

06. April 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Build a Website · Tags: , , , ,

By now you should have the hang of adding pictures and editing text in the existing text boxes. You should also know how to add new pages to the site by adding them to the menu (see previous tutorial). Now let’s look at adding extra elements to a page and adding pages without them appearing in the menu – it’s the next step to help you create your own website using Webeden. Lets do it – here’s 10 steps to adding extra elements to your pages

Step 1

Click on Files to open the File Manager and then select the Library tab and click on Animations / Handwritten. Click on “Circle it” and select Use this. The animation will be added to the page. By default, the line drawn is white. Select the animation object and in the Editor dialog click on the Style tab and change the colour to black. You can also resize and rotate the animation on the Info tab (see previous page). Position the circle over the top of an area of the page that you want to draw attention to, like a picture.

Step 2

Now add the arrow from the Handwritten section in the same way. Use the Rotate feature on the Info tab to enable freehand rotation using the object’s handles. When you add a page to your site, you can choose from a list of different page types. There are different templates readily available so you don’t have to design a complicated page from the ground up, which makes for a handy shortcut when you’re website building. For example, the blog/news page will create a ready made weblog for you, together with an integrated editor to allow you to add items.

Step 3

You can also add links only, so a button appears in the menu, but no page is created (the opposite of adding a page, but not having it visible). There’s even an image gallery – one tip with images you upload is to ensure the dimensions aren’t larger than you need to keep download times down, somthing you should take not of when you create your own website.

Step 4

Now click on Insert and select Button Link. This will add a bevelled image to the page. Move it to within the left column. Click on the Link tab in the Editor dialog and enter the URL you want to link to, like http://www.webeden.co.uk/. Click on Apply and you’ll see that the text on the button changes also. Click on the Style tab and you can now change the text on the button. Do it in this order, as changing the link will overwrite the text.

Step 5

The next step on your website building fast track is to click on the More arrow in the Editor dialog (top right) and select Body Text Box (you can hover over each icon to get a tooltip). Drag the text box to the left column, underneath the button we just inserted. Use the handles at the corners and bottom of the text frame to resize it to fit within the column. Now select the Style tab and click on the Background button to enable a background for the text frame, and select a colour from the drop down menu to the right, and do the same for the border.

Step 6

An alterative when you make your own website to using the text frame’s background and border is to add a background frame, such as a shape with bevelled edges from the Library, and then add a text box on top, which will show the frame beneath it through it.

Step 7

Now go to Insert / New page and click on the Add new page button; just make it a blank page. Label the page “Chat” and then disable the radio button in the Page visible column. This will add the page to the site without it being added into your automatically generated menu. We will add a link to this new page within the master page, but to do this, you must create the page first as you cannot add a link to a non-existent page, even if you know what you are going to call it. You can still access the page to edit it from the Pages menu – a perfect website building tip.

Step 8

On the new page, double click in the title text box to edit the text and change it to “Chat to other user online” and then single click on the main text box and click on the Delete icon.

Step 9

Now click on the Files button to bring up the File Manager and from the library, select Functional and add the Chat object to the page. Close the File Manager and then resize the chat object to fill the content element of the page underneath the headline. Click on Design / Page master and remember to save the page when it asks you. Always remember this if you want to quickly build your own website!

Step 10

Add a new button link and drag it to the top right of the page, above the date. With the button selected, choose the Link tab in the Editor and select the Pages icon (it looks like horizontal lines). This allows you to link to a page on your site. Select Chat from the drop down menu and click Apply. As before the button’s text will change.

Step 11

In the Style tab change the button text to “Chat to other users”. Click on Save and Exit.

Step 12

Change to the View my site, so you can see the site as a user, rather than editing it, and you will see that we have added a fully featured chat feature to our site, all within the space of a few clicks. What an amazing what to create a website that looks professional and advanced.

Expert tip

When you add a page to WebEden, you can choose from a list of different page types. There are different templates readily available so you don’t have to design a complicated page from the ground up. For example, the blog/news page will create a ready made weblog for you, together with an integrated editor to allow you to add items. You can also add links only, so a button appears in the menu, but no page is created (the opposite of adding a pgae, but not having it visible, as we did in Step 3). There’s even an image gallery – one tip with images you upload is to ensure the dimensions aren’t larger than you need to keep download times down.

That’s all for now

Check in for part 4 to find out how to add some really cool stuff to make sure that you can build a website, and it’s the best one possible!

Charles is a website building expert and wants to help everyone to build your own website