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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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.

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.