by Ever thought about building your own website, only to be put off because, at first glance, it seems like a pretty expensive endeavour?
If money’s the only thing stopping you from claiming your own piece of the Internet action, there’s no need to be put off any longer, not when there are completely free tools at your disposal to help you establish your own online presence.
Whether you’re a small business lacking the marketing budget of your big name competitors, or simply someone with a passion they want to share with the world, here’s three easy ways to build a website without spending any money.
1) Use an online website builder
The majority of the best online website building sites offer free plans. These equip you with all the tools you’ll need to set up a great looking website with no money or technical knowledge required.
This makes them a particularly attractive option if you want to build a website but have no desire to get bogged down in pages of mind-blogging website code.
Among the big name brands like Webs, Squarespace and Webs, you’ll find free templates that you can change and customise to suit your tastes, a clear, simple-to-navigate user interface employing drag and drop technology to make building your website no more difficult than moving your mouse around the screen, and lots of additional tools such as blogs, photo galleries, and in some case, even shopping carts for those of you looking to launch your own online store.
Depending on which service you decide to use, you may find certain limits on how many of these tools you can use for free, along with certain other restrictions, though to launch a low cost website quickly and easily, you can hardly go wrong with using a site building tool.
2) Start a blog
Though popular blogging platform WordPress can be used alongside a paid hosting plan to act as a complete Content Management System for building your website, there’s still a lot of scope out there for using the free, WordPress-hosted version.
With the option to create static pages alongside your rolling blog content, using WordPress is particularly ideal if you’re website will feature lots of new content on a regular basis.
The one drawback here is that you may find you’re fairly limited in choosing the look and feel of your blog. Though WordPress’ template gallery does feature a sizeable amount of free themes for you to use, once you’ve put one in place, you only have a few options to customise.
That said, with the world’s most popular blogging platform powering your website, you’ll have no problems creating a site that more than holds its own against those with a bit of money behind them.
3) Download free website building software
The online site building tools we mentioned above should be more than sufficient to get the job done, but there may be occasions when you prefer to do things offline, such as if you don’t have access to always-on broadband when you need to work on your site.
That’s where free website editors such as Web Plus, PageBreeze, or even the free version of Coffee Cup come in handy, giving you the tools to make your website without going online.
As with the other two options, there are drawbacks here. With PageBreeze in particular, you’ll find that the end results don’t hold up well when it comes to modern standards of design.
Still, for a basic site, this is more than sufficient to get the job done.
