How to Create a Free Website

Professionally designed websites are a must for small businesses, but there are times when a simple, quick, and free little website would do the trick.

Read on for my review of free web creation tools...

It may be that you need you want to create a site for a new product, a new service, you want to optimise for a particular key phrase, or perhaps you want to dabble with affiliate marketing. These little websites are called microsites.

I've done a bit of an experiment with the free web building tools to see just how effective they are. And my definition of "free" is more accurately called "cheap" - because I want to have my own domain name attached to the website, if possible, so there will be some costs involved.

The Clear Winner: WordPress

WordPress is free web building software that also allows you to create standard web pages, although it is best known as blogging software.

In the matter of 4 hours and spending a grand total of £22.78 I built the new website Susan Hallam.

I'm not sure how you factor in the cost of my 25 years experience, but I'm discounting that for the moment.

I'm using the site to discuss this experiment, so read about my free web design experiences here.

WordPress ticked all the boxes I required:

• Search engine friendliness
• Easy to use
• Free design templates
• Extra functionality like contact forms
• Web statistics to measure if it is working or not
• Flexibility in terms of content and layout
• My own domain name
• Doesn't look "free"
• Help when I need it

The Losers

My first loser is BT TradeSpace. It fails for most of my criteria:

• it is clearly branded BT Tradespace, and looks like a freebie website
• no use of my own domain name
• very restrictive design limitations
• very limited page content
• it doesn't look very search engine friendly

My second loser is Google Page Creator. This is a free service offered to folk with a GoogleMail account. Again, I found the same limitations as BT TradeSpace as a web design tool in terms of limitation of design and content and use of domain names.

One particular strength of Google Page Creator, however, is the ability to design your pages and then upload them to the free 100MB of hosting space. If you're looking for a place to store stuff on the web, then this might be useful to you.

Next week I'll be evaluating two more services: Microsoft Office Live
and Yahoo Site Builder

If you want me to try out any other free services, then just let me know.