How free is the “free” website creation?

Since the dawn of Internet its users wanted to have their share of making their voice heard. Internet provided and still (even more now) provides the ability for reaching a mass audience. This wish was fulfilled by a number of ways throughout the years with technologies and services for all pockets and technical abilities. As a service provider though in order to go mass it meant to go free. Many free web hosting providers mushroomed, many free “make your own page” services appeared. Some were good some were bad, most of them were kitsch.

Today we are blessed with the ability to have a variety of technologies and services that enable us to express our opinion online without having to put our hands too deep in the pocket. Blogging platforms, social networking services, free hosts all play their distinct role in the digital economy chain. Defining free though is hard in terms of money and customization ability. You may use free to tools to build a website and then pay 5 dollars per month to host it somewhere. You may use a free blogging platform and still pay 10 dollars a year for your own domain. You may even a buy cool easy to use tool to build everything and host your site on a free host. Free is what suits you to be free. You may build, host and advertise your site totally for free though...but that comes at a cost as well....the irony.

I dislike free hosting services, they usually place their own ads on your site, worst yet, they are unreliable and you may end up loosing everything. I do not really like blogs that are myblog.arandombloggingplatform.com. Domain name is long, it is not easy to remember and it just looks scrapy. Tools from the other hand are a totally different story. There are many great tools and technologies for building and managing your site that are free to use. Social networking services...well I am not a big fan, but a great deal of people like them. You cannot do a lot out there and most end up with having the most kitsch page on the web (you can call me myspace). On the other hand there are more formalized webpage social networking services like squidoo but some might not like the absence of creative freedom.

If you want to go totally free there are solutions out there, but why do that? The outcome will be far worse than with just paying 10 dollars a year for a blog domain or 3-5 dollars per month if you are hosting everything. As always you have to see what you want to build and then decide on the technology and the platform and calculate the costs. It may not be totally free but it will not be expensive either.

Create a webpage with Squidoo

The Internet is a strange place. Web 2.0 is even stranger as it combines all those things that where available before but in a fancy new easy to use way. When I first stumbled on Squidoo I was puzzled as to what it was. Its first page wasn't very informative as to what this is exactly, but it all looked very exciting indeed. At first I thought it was a light-hearted collaborative encyclopedia, then I thought it was a blogging platform, later on I found out that it had social networking functionalities. When I created an account it looked like a webpage building tool. In the end I realized that it is all that together and something more.

Squidoo is totally free. You can create an account and start creating a webpage immediately. These pages are called lenses. Every lens is a single page with a coherent subject. As a lens master you build lenses about anything you like. You can have a lens about cars and another lens about gardening. in each of your lenses Squidoo will show some adds relevant to the subject of the page. The money generated from these ads can go to you, or to some charity, or to both. This is a novel idea since the platform provides you with a direct way of income without you having to do anything more than building great content and on top of that you can set the money to go directly to charities. You do not have to create an account with some online ads agency or try affiliate marketing. All is done through Squidoo. I am not suggesting that you can make a lot of money, or easily for that matter (such thing does not exist), but it is certainly a plus for the platform, especially for beginners.


In order to build your lens, Squidoo provides you with various tools and ready-made modules that you can add on your page. You can view your page and add modules wherever you like. These modules might be polls, simple text, photos, videos and more. You can later edit them or reorder them. Building a simple page is very easy as it all comes down to creating the content (writing the text, creating images, etc.) without any technicalities.


You can join special groups in Squidoo to make your lens known. These groups specialize in various areas such as computers or sports. In addition you can visit other people's lenses and write comments as well as have a guest book of your own. You build a profile that is used for your lenses where you can put anything you want; like photos, mini autobiography, etc.

The amazing thing with Squidoo is that it can be used to meet like-minded people with the same interests, write stuff that you are passionate about to inform other people, create a small income, learn stuff, do something creative and have fun along the way. Not bad for a web 2.0 platform.

Add social bookmarking buttons

So you have created your Blog, you changed its template to match your unique style and you started posting. In Blogs it is very important that your readers can share posts they find interesting with their friends and the online communities they belong to. This provide you with extra traffic to your Blog. If a post brings you new readers and they like what they see, they will stay. Thus you have to provide your visitors with an easy way of sharing your post with others.

In this web 2.0 era, social bookmarking has become a standard and there are many sites and communities that provide such functionality. Having a button for each of them will fill your posts with colorful, yet easy to miss buttons and you will end up confusing your readers. Let alone, that providing a button for each one will be a very tedious task.

The answer to your problems are buttons that open up a list of communities and sites and your readers can select the one that they want to use. So you can have a bookmarking mechanism that includes digg, facebook, Reddit, yahoo and many more in one easy to use button.

Each of your posts should have one at the bottom so your readers can post that specific article and not the whole page or else their friends will be lost, trying to find the article that your reader was telling them about. Makes sense doesn't it.

There are two very good social bookmarking buttons that I use and I suggest that you give them a try: addtoany and addthis, that you can find in www.addtoany.com and www.addthis.com respectively.

Just go there and pick your button. Both come in different styles so you can choose the one that you like best and suits your website or blog.

You can add them anywhere you want. It is just a small piece of javascript that you can put anywhere on your pages. If you are using blogspot for your blog, in order to add it at the bottom of each of your posts, pick the appropriate code from the site and then go to Edit Html from the Layout menu. Click on Expand Widget Templates and near the bottom find the post-footer tag. Place the code there and voila! Social bookmarking button for each of your posts.

Website creation overview

Creating a website is not just one thing that you do and you are over. In order to build you website you follow a certain path of steps. Nothing major...do not worry, but there a some things that you have to do. As a matter of fact even if you “finish” building your website and it is up and running, you still have work do. You have to promote it, renew its content etc. Do not feel overwhelmed. Sticking with the plan you will successfully create your website and enjoy the ride while at it.

Decide what kind of website you want to create

Ok, so you have decided to create a website. You are just not sure what sort of website it will be. I suggest that you think of nothing else, such as technology or name, before you clear this out. This is very important since it will be your guide into deciding the name and technology involved. Different sites are better-suited with different technologies.


Pick a technology platform to build your site

After you decide on what kind of website you will build you have to choose a website technology. Each website platform has its advantages and its disadvantages. For example if you just want to create a blog where you will post your thoughts about a certain niche, using a complex dynamic content management system is an overkill. On the other hand if you want to create a online community with forum, blogs, galleries, handle user registration and maybe add a shopping cart then creating it from scratch using a blogging platform or a WYSIWYG editor is out of the question. You would have to use something powerful like joomla.

Choose a domain name for your website

Now it is time to choose a domain name. Do not take this lightly since a domain name can make or break a website. Choose wisely. Keep it simple and catchy. Make it descriptive and make sure it contains your target keywords to be found on search engines.

Build your website

Depending on the technology that you picked it is time that you started building your site. Creating pages. Sorting out issues and most importantly creating content. If you choose a ready made platform like Blogger you life might be simpler and you just concentrate on appearance and content. Should you have opted for a tougher road do not despair because you will be handling everything in no-time after a while.

Manage your website

Ok so you have created your site. Even if everything is perfect be prepared for some changes. Every day you will see something new that you want to try. Keeping an eye on you site's statistics and usage with google analytics you are bound to change something to make your website more user-friendly.


Build traffic for your website

Everything is in place and ready but you have no readers. You have to create some traffic for your website, drive people to it. Creating traffic involves many things and may take some time but do not worry. Follow the rules of search engine optimization (SEO), read what not to do for SEO and you are heading to the right direction. Oh and beware of those SEO companies that promise you the world.

Change Blogger template

When you first create a blog you are given the choice to select between various ready-made themes to setup your blog with. The problem with that is that most of the Internet users have got really bored of them because you see them everywhere.

Most people for some reasons, beyond me, do not change them. This ends up in half the blogs out there using the same themes. You want your blog to be unique, you do not want it to look like every other blog. In addition, ready-made blogger templates found on your control panel use only one column. What if you need two or more columns? What if you you need side panels on the left and on the right of screen? Default blogger templates cannot help you there.

Changing or editing your blog theme is fairly easy (or dead easy when using ready-made templates that you downloaded off the internet). When you are at any of your control panel's pages, click on the “Layout” tab. Then, clicking on edit HTML presents you with your current template's code.

The format followed by most templates is the same: At the top you have your CSS elements corresponding to the various components on screen(such as the posts, the lists etc) and at the bottom you have your template's structure in HTML. Inside the code you will find some blogger specifc tags, but do not be worried, because they are not too many and it is easy to understand what they do.

From the same page you can upload new templates that you find around the internet. Before any major changes though, make sure to save your template. If anything goes wrong you do not want to start all over gain. It is very important to note, though, that when you change your template you loose all the elements in your blog. For example, if you added an element holding links and you change your template this list will be gone. So, make sure you note everything dow and back up what you can.

For ready-made templates your can check at:

• Blogger templates from mashable.com
• FreshBloggerTemplates.com

The template is a very important aspect of you blog. It helps your readers identify it. It makes it unique and stand out from the crowd. You want your blog to have personality and even though your posts are that count in that, the template is not to be ignored.