Setting Up Your Own Website

There are several companies who offer "free hosting". be careful which company you choose. Some will bombard you with spam or sell your email address to other spammers. Others will paste their ads on your site.

Wix and Yola are the best of the "create your free website" companies. They offer professional looking websites for free, but you have to pay to get your own domain and an ad free site.

Do you want one page or more than one?

If you only need one page (for example, you're a social worker or a massage therapist who needs a simple web presence), you can get a web page for about $12 a year on www.GoDaddy.com . They offer a free one page website if you register your domain (website name) with them. Networksolutions.com offers the same deal, as does 123-reg in the UK.

Almost free

Yola.com is an interesting animal. For as low as $10.95 a year you can reserve your own URL, and that domain includes: Complete ownership of the domain, Access to Yola's easy-to-use website creator, Free website hosting (no limits on site traffic), 24/7 Customer Support, 1 GB storage space, No ads, Over 100 professionally designed website templates and the ability to track your visitors.

Wix also offer an entire free website, and claim it's so easy, anyone can do it. But if you really want your OWN website, with your own domain name (URL), you need to pay them about $60 a year. Still a good deal.

How about a blog?

A blog (short for web log) is like an online journal. Millions of people post their expert opinions, information, thoughts or ideas to the web. Some people use blogs to publish simple newspapers, although the search and archive capabilities are limited. You don't have to know anything about HTML or other web technologies. You can get an ad-free blog completely free at a number of sites. Two good ones are Diaryland, which has a customizable interface, and blogger.com, owned by Google Both are free and easy to set up.

WordPress is a leader in providing blog software. Theyl'll host your website or you can find a host like www.easyspace.com that offers WordPress as a simple-to-implement option. WordPress has a number of (not free) add ons, available from WordPress and third parties like Artisteer, a Wordpress Theme Generator that lets you create your own design for your Wordpress site.

If you want to to share your interests, you can build a subject-based "lens" on Squidoo. It's sort of like a blog, but also offers you building blocks of your own to add videos, polls, news headlines, links to other websites and more.

A free store

freewebstore offers a free basic online store. They make their money selling extra services.