Free
Learn how to build a website for free:
So you want to build a website but you don’t have any money to spare, can you learn how to build a website for free? It is possible to build a website for free but you probably will sacrifice control, power or useability but if you are on a shoe string budget and have no other choice a free website is better than no website and you can always upgrade to paid products and services as your website becomes profitable. There is also the option of using a free service such as a FaceBook Page to put your business or idea online without its own stand alone website however again you sacrifice control when you rely on another company to completely provide your web presence.
Free Domains?
It is very unlikely you will be able to get your own top level domain name for free unless it is tied to some other paid service or product such as hosting and even then you may not actually have ownership of the domain if it is being paid for by a third party. Domains in general are one of the cheapest things you need to build a website however considering they can cost as little as seven dollars for a full year of registration you should be able to afford them, just skip that value meal at mcdonalds! However if you insist on doing everything for free there are url redirection and shortening options that are free that will allow you to get a short url that you can then redirect to your real domain if in the future you upgrade and buy one. A common URL shortening service is TinyUrl. Another option is CJB.net which allows you to create a url like www.yourname.cjb.net this redirect url lets you change where it points without losing your traffic however you either need to point it to your ip address or some other url that you control.
Free Hosting?
Finding free hosting was much easier in the early days of the internet when venture capital was pumping money into any internet company, there were even companies like TerraShare that paid YOU to build a website on their hosting, splitting the advertising revenue with you. Obviously this was not a sustainable business practice and many free hosts went out of business or changed their models to pay for service. You can still find hosts offering free services to build your website on their servers however they usually require you to display ads on your website or limit your bandwidth and server resources so severly that you are forced to upgrade to paid services once your website gets popular. The best option is to find a host that will be able to scale up your services as your website grows, many shared virtual hosting accounts cost only a few dollars a month which eliminates the possibility of your hosting being shut down and losing all your hard work. Angelfire still offers free website hosting and many free building tools too however I would suggest that there are other hosting providers that are more focused on paid services and are willing to work with you to scale up your websites as needed without worrying about becoming too big and popular for the host.
Free CMS?
Once you have a free domain and hosting you need the tools to actually build your website and there are many free options for CMS and designing tools. Many of the popular web design software companies offer either free limited trials or very basic versions that are free or cheap. For instance the graphic design software Photoshop is expensive for its premium products however they offer Photoshop Elements for a lower price with less options which is perfect for a newbie trying to build their first website and Adobe even offers free limited time trials to see if you even need their software. While web design software can be found cheap or free you might not even need it if you only want to work online you could use a free CMS to build your website. WordPress.com offers a free hosted version on their script that would make building a website for free very easy as it combines a domain, hosting, and the CMS in one package. Then using WordPress designing and updating a free website becomes as easy as drag and drop or finding a free theme to create the layout and style you want.
So is it possible to build a website for free? As you can see combining the various free options online today you can indeed setup and complete a website without spending any money. While I suggest spending the small registration fee for a domain and a cheap virtual hosting account to get full control and ability to scale up quickly if you are really trying to save money you can find free products and services to get your online presence up and running today.
WP setup
While WordPress is a widely popular and powerful website building cms it can be daunting to install and learn how to use especially for a first time user that has little web design experience so here is a short tutorial to provide installation and setup help for WordPress.
WordPress is a CMS (Content management system) generally used for blogging but robust enough to manage most any type of website so you would expect installation to be complicated however it is really very simple. The WP website offers a handy five minute installation tutorial that explains the initial setup steps so I won’t spend anytime explaining that process. I would however suggest that if you don’t understand the first few lines of the install process you should just submit a ticket to your host and ask them to install it for you as most hosts will take care of it quickly and easily for you.
Once the initial WordPress script is installed you are faced with a dashboard, menu sidebar and tons of options which is where it might become confusing for a first time user. My first steps tweak some settings and setup the script to make it work best for a seo website. One quick thing to setup is the ‘permalinks’ option located under the ‘settings’ menu. The default setting creates your website links using numeric values that do not provide any search engine benefits so I suggest you use the ‘custom structure’ option with some tags such as /%postname%/%post_id%/%categories%/ which the script will replace with text that might help search engines to determine your pages/posts content and provide better rankings. To alter this setting you may need to set your .htaccess file permission to 777 so that the script can write to it, or you can do it manually and upload the file via ftp.
Another setting to change is under ‘General’ which is the ‘tagline’ option that appears under your site title on all the pages, you really want to use that prime spot at the top of your website to create some search engine friendly text.
The ‘Discussion’ menu option contains a number of options you might want to alter depending on if you want to recieve emails when users comment or register though you should be aware many spammers use blog comments so you will get a great deal of spam if you aren’t careful and monitor them.
The other big menu options to explore are the ‘Appearance’ menu and the ‘Plugins’ menu. The appearance menu contains your ‘theme’ opitions which you can use to change the layout and structure of the WordPress website with no real coding on your part. I would suggest using only paid premium theme’s or ones that have been approved and vetted by wordpress as people have been known to offer free themes that contain hidden link codes and spam that you might not notice but could negatively affect your website or visitors. Also the ‘Plugin’ menu lets you install a huge variety of plugins that can expand the utility of your WordPress script, again be careful that the plugins you install are legitimate and preferrably updated regularly. Generally the most popular plugins are safe and obviously useful since thousands of people have been using them.
Finally your initial Word Press install created a basic post, page, and comment as well as links in the blog roll. You can use these as examples to learn from but I would suggest altering or deleting them as soon as possible because they provide no other use. Lastly WordPress creates a ‘Powered by WordPress’ link at the bottom of your website which you can remove by editing the footer.php file you can find under ‘Appearance’ > ‘Editor’ menu though if you use a custome theme the link may already be removed. Either way leaving that link creates the possibility hackers or others can scan the internet and find all the wordpress blogs easily which could lead to problems for you, besides nobody needs to know what CMS you are using as long as your website works and looks good!
Categories: Tutorials, Word Press Tags: installing, scripts, setup, wordpress, wp
WordPress
WordPress is blogging software that allows a person to quickly and easily setup a website using a simple script that provides a framework to input and publish content on the internet. WordPress became popular because of its ease of use and search engine optimization right out of the box plus it is regularly updated and now there are thousands of developers continually releasing new themes and plugins to make the basic wordpress blog into a robust fully functional website. WordPress can be used from everything from basic blogging to ecommerce and entertainment websites. The functionality and options available to a person using wordpress as their websites backend is very nearly limitless and always expanding. Another big reason wordpress became popular is that the basic blog script is free and there is the option of either having a blog hosted on WordPress.com or downloading and self hosting the script on your own server allowing for a great deal of freedom.
While you can use the hosted WordPress and not worry about the technical aspects you do lose a bit of control so many people download and install the script on their own hosting. To do that WordPress requires PHP and MySQL though once you have the script installed you do not need to have any php or mysql knowledge to design and build your website making web design much simplier and eliminating many of the problems people in the past had with building websites. Now you can simply drag and drop ‘widgets’ into your design or download pre-made ‘themes’ or templates so creating a website becomes very simple and quick. While you can use the built in editor to alter the websites code directly if you do know php or other web languages it is not necessary. Another reason WordPress is so popular is that you can give other users limited or unlimited access to create content for your website eliminating another problem many websites run into which is running out of content, now your users or friends can be editors too! Beyond that WordPress allows basics visitors to leave comments and that can create even more content as well as provide more web 2.0 benefits.
One problem with using blogging scripts including WordPress is that they can pose a security risk to your server. Especially WordPress because of its popularity it can be a focus of hackers that can cause problems for your website if they gain access. Even if you don’t get hacked the comment option on wordpress can lead your site to being filled with spam if you don’t utilize the built in protections and monitor your website. So while building your website with a WordPress script is both quick and easy providing a great deal of benefits there are potential problems that you need to monitor and address though with the rapid development and upgrades of the script most problems can be managed without much more work. Still it is important to realize that there are limits to all scripts like WordPress and keep regular backup copies of your website in case of problems.
Categories: Blogging, Word Press Tags: blogs, scripts, wordpress