Setting Up Your Own Website

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. You can also try a more traditional company like MyGoto.com which offers a free sitebuilding tool and charges only $4 a month.

Another choice is SnapMonkey. They promise that if you have the skills to create a word document, you have the skills to create a website with their interface. They offer a 10 day free trial.

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. BigCommerce is a new company, dedicated to ECommerce. Their interface is straightforward and they offer lots of support. 15 day free trial.

Camera related companies like Snapfish.com by HP 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 view your photos as slide shows as well as organized albums. A good choice for clubs, or just for showing slides of your latest trip to Orlando.