What is the purpose of your website?

You have many options available to you. Some are free, some cost money. All cost time. The type of website you set up is going to depend on your goal in having a website.

A Website to Share Information or Advertise Your Business

If your goal is to share information about your company or service, or to communicate among members of an organization, a standard website can be set up for very little money. www.GoDaddy.com even offers a free one page website if you register your domain (website name) with them. If you need more than one page, godaddy offers web hosting with site building tools, as does Yahoo! Web Hosting. Both offer excellent support for the do-it-yourselfer. There's also Yola , a relative newcomer with excellent prices, starting at $0 and going up very little from there. They have a friendly, accessible interface. You can even get FREE advertising credits worth $50 with every Yola Silver purchase, which is only about $50 a year, including your own URL. If you want a ready-made site, with informatin already filled in about your industry, you can try a company like www.RiaEnjolie.com. More about setting up a website to share information >

An online store

For a few dollars a month and some sweat equity, you can set up a store that will enable you to offer your products to customers around the world. No HTML or technical expertise required. Yahoo! Merchant Solutions offers site building and product upload tools, and credit card processing built in to their various packages. ProStores - an eBay Company offers a one month free trial for you to see if you want to get into the business of eCommerce.

Sharing thoughts: a Blog

Blogs (short for web logs) have become very popular. Like an online diary, they let you post your thoughts, ideas and emotions to the web whenever you wish, without having to know anything about HTML or other web technologies. Some let your readers post responses to your entries. You can get an ad-free blog completely free at a number of sites. An easy-to-use one is Diaryland, which has a teenage-looking interface but is customizable. There are also blogger.com, owned by Google, and WordPress. Both are free and easy to set up. WordPress has become very popular as a vehicle for online news as well as blogs, and 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.

Another interesting alternative is Squidoo. It's sort of like a blog. You can write pages of information about yourself. But it also offers you building blocks of your own to add videos, polls, news headlines, links to other websites and more.

  Sharing snapshots

Film developers like and camera manufacturers like want you to store your photos on their site because they're hoping to sell you prints, coasters, calendars and so forth. These sites are a great deal. You're not obligated to buy anything, and you get free online photo albums for your friends and relatives to view. Most let you put up slide shows as well as organized albums. A good choice for clubs, or just for showing slides of your latest trip to Orlando.

Forums and Chat

Forums and chat rooms are both ways for people to talk to each other. Forums are online bulletin boards, where people leave messages that others can read and reply to. Chats are real-time text conversations.

Where to Get It

Free Pages:

Websites:

Online store:

BLOGs:

Forum/chat:

Photo Albums: