Q&A: Making a Website for Free

Here's a question I was asked recently that you may find interesting:

"Do you know what's the best way to go if I want to set up my own website for free? I googled "free website" and pulled up a bunch of stuff that looked kind of tricky--like officelive.com that said it was free but when I looked deeper it said it would charge my credit card after awhile. I was wondering what you thought."

Of course, if you are willing to put up with the culture and ads, MySpace was made for this. But since I can't reccomend Myspace to anyone without feeling like I have to make a burnt offering to the Lord afterwards, I suggested a more creative approach... WARNING: This is not for the feint of heart (or those afraid of "words" like HTML):

Free hosting is hard to come by but there are some options out there for the creative.

I guess it really depends on what you need the site to do. If you were doing a basic info site with some downloadable files I would probably try a Wordpress/Google Group combination. Wordpress, while intended to be a blog is actually a highly evolved CMS (content management system) that can be used to make great websites.

The best part is, the site is controlled like a blog, so it is very easy to edit content.

The reason for the Google Group is that you can upload files to it and that link directly to those files on your site (this is transparent to users).

Another plus to using this set up is, no ads! It's completely ad free.

I would advise that you buy a domain name though unless you want mysite.wordpress.com to be your address. You can get one for $8 a year at godaddy.com. Using domain-forwarding through godaddy you can have your site appear to be hosted on your own domain. :)

http://wordpress.com
http://groups.google.com/
http://godaddy.com/

You're going to have to get your hands pretty dirty to get it done (what do you expect for free!), but it should be fun and completely convincing when you're done. WordPress is an awesome system. You'll need a good template that allows for multiple pages. Here's some good WordPress links:

http://themes.wordpress.net (if you don't like any of the defaults)
http://wp-plugins.net/
http://faq.wordpress.com/ - to answer your questions :)

If you need to host images for your template, try photobucket.com or flickr.com.


There's probably an easier way to do this if you want to put up with ads, but for the best end product, this is the route I would take!

Sorry if that seems like too much work to you! You could always fork out the dough if you don't like it though :)