Small Web Sites?

[big_teee]

It's mentioned often, about how to get a small Business or personal Website Going.
We have members doing small Hobby Businesses all the time.
I've been hearing about some free, or inexpensive websites.
Do you know of anything simple and cheap to do?
Please discuss.
Thanks,
T

[mikeydee77]

Hi,

My take on this would be to see what your ISP includes in your Internet connection. Usually there is sufficient web space for a fairly static 'brochure' style web page. Good enough to list services and contact details. Sometimes you can for a small amount say 10 GBP purchase a domain and have your ISP host it.

But even if its is static you can add more features by using the nice features that Google and yahoo give for free or at least in exchange for your information. They provide simple embed code for you to copy and paste into your html.

Some example ideas

A google spreadsheet tracking items for sale, prices and stock
A calendar showing opening times
picture galleries and blogs showing that you are actively working
A form for capturing lead contacts and tracking jobs

If you have the energy my recommendation is to use something like WordPress which is simple to use once set up and looks good on all devices. You can edit from smartphone, tablet or desktop/laptop.

Just some ideas. Please let me know if I can elaborate further.

[km6xz]

There are many web hosts which provide free hosting in exchange for ads and some which are fee based that allow sophisticated web design for beginners using on-line web authoring systems. One that has a lot of features is Free Website Builder | Create a Free Website | WIX for a modest monthly fee.
Free services such as Weebly.com or webs.com can be used.

Google has its own free hosting service called sites.google.com
Shared hosting where you can get your domain name, can be as little as $5/mon or $25 a month for your own dedicated server(Virtual Private Server .....VPS) that you could load up with as many sites as you wish. The cheapest and easiest domain registrar is Domain Names | The World's Largest Domain Name Registrar - GoDaddy, from which you could also get a hosting service if you wanted.

One of the most popular ways of creating an attractive feature rich web site for non-web developers is to use a Blog such as Wordpress. It is free to download and install on your server or most of the shared server hosts have a feature where you can turn it on with simply one mouse click. It integrates into a number of shopping cart programs that would allow selling services or products. Wordpress is really popular because adding content or editing articles is as easy as using a word processor, since content is text or images that are separate from the scripting language used to present and format the page.
There are a billion web sites now because it is really easy to create a simple web site. A complex customized system however, like most of the large popular web sites like Amazon represent the continuous work by a large department with a very large yearly budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Good luck

[jbltwin1]

The hosting plan I use for my sites is about $65.00 a YEAR fora single site. Get the multiple site rate and it's not that much higher. Maybe $100.00. That isn't much. Of course, I write my own code and do the work myself but if you can get a site built from one of the free sources, you can learn how to load it. That's pretty cheap. By the way, I use go daddy/

PS-my ISP provides me with a small site too that I wrote but the url is apain in the %^$ so I just link to it from my band site so I don't have to type it all out. AND it's free.

[The Dude]

I get 50M of web space per email account with my web provider up to 7 accounts. I just build sites there uploaded with WS_FTP. You can get free web templates all over the web, or build your own site from scratch. Then you simply need to register your domain name. I use GoDaddy and then use their domain forwarding service to point the domain to my free servers. Cost is a few bucks a year for domain registration.

There are MUCH easier ways to do it with a service, but I hate having their ads all over my site. That's why I chose this method.