Creating a free website!

I have found a few places recently that allow you to do somethings that I have spent months researching online! First, let me tell you that I am very cautious about those "free" sites that offer you the opportunity to have a free website or other kind of online connections. Mostly they are just pure advertisement money makers for the companies that offer them. Now that being said, it would be crazy for a site to not take the opportunity to make some sort of money off of a site that you place on their server if that company lets you place your site for free. So you can guess that the sites that I am going to give you do place some sort of advertisement or tagline stating that they are powered by said company on the page or pages that they offer you. However, as I mentioned before, I have spent tons of time searching for these places and have run across a few lately that I have to recommend to the new webbie.

Mainly I recommend these sites for several reasons.

• First, the sites offering these make little or no money for your pages and some even let you make a nickle or two (and no, these are not affiliate sites so I am not making any money by recommending them... I truly admire these companies and what they have to offer).
• Second, if you are like me and have spent way to much time trying to learn programming languages just to get something other than your basic mySpace page, then these sites are not for you. They offer really simple web design portals that turn out great pages with minimum effort and virtually no programming effort (although the savvy user will be able to turn a page or two into a money maker... just be sure to understand the TOS for each site).
• Lastly, these sites are among the most recommended web 2.0 sites and are mostly new players to the field. And you will see, if you choose to visit one or more of them, that they will be around for quite a while.

So, enough waiting... now the sites!

Weebly.com lets users design homepages for themselves and has fantastic templates to get you started. Choose from over 20 professional designs to get you started then just drag and drop the elements you want on your page! Weebly.com lets users place AdBrite ads on their pages with ease or advanced users can always choose to use their AdSense ads with the custom HTML element.

Spruz.com is still in beta but is another great choice for the new web page designer! A step-by-step tutorial will guide users through designing their own page or (better yet) their own online social network. Just glancing at the choice of templates it looks as though there are over 100 designs to choose from and all are able to be customized once you have chosen one!

Shopify.com is by far one of my favorite finds! It lets anyone, and I mean anyone, set up shop and sell their own goods with several awesome storefronts to choose from. Each is customizeable of course or those who choose to program their own can take advantage of a nifty program on the site that lets you design your own store front (a bit of programming knowledge is neccessary). You will need to sign up with PayPal or Google Checkout in order to process your credit cards or you can use several other available methods. They only charge a low 3% of total sales up to $10,000 per month which can be much cheaper than buying your own site!

If you like these sites, keep in mind that most of them will allow you to use your own domain name. So, if you already have www.myshop.com, you can tell Shopify.com to forward all browser requests for www.myshop.com to your Shopify.com store. If they don't offer domain forwarding, keep in mind that your domain registrar probably does so you can still accomplish the same effect! If you use one of these sites, why not leave a comment or two for the other readers and let them know what kind of experience you have had with them. And as always... links to your site are always welcome! Thanks and happy designing guys!

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