Free site builders
Small business owners – if your business budget and technical requirements tarry you from building a site for your business, there are plenty of free services available on the Internet you can consider that can help you build your first site in minutes.
As of for me, despite I build self-hosted sites on regular basis, I still use free blog/web site hosting – mainly for the purpose of business branding, Internet marketing and SEO/link building.
Here are three sites I regularly use and personally recommend:
1. WordPress.com
I love WordPress and anything related to it. If creating a site or blog and host it yourself seems too much hassle, I strongly recommend you to create a blog (or site) on WordPress.com. If what you want is to create a site, WordPress has evolved into a CMS (content management system) instead of just a blogging platform, meaning, you can create a company website on WordPress with or without the need to blog.
As an upside, you can buy a domain name and link it to your WordPress.com site, so you can have www.yourbusinessname.com instead of yourbusinessname.wordpress.com
2. Squidoo.com
Squidoo is very popular among Internet marketers – many have sold lots of products using Squidoo lenses (a.k.a. individual web pages,) as well as using them as branding purposes. That being said, it is proven that well-built Squidoo lenses CAN get prospects to notice your business or what you have got to offer.
3. Weebly.com
Weebly is one of the most intuitive free site builders/hosting companies. With Weebly platform, you can have a great control on how your site should look like – creating a site is done via click-and-drags – just select what you are going to add to your site – images, texts, texts-with-images, and any other ‘draggables,’ including choosing a design template for your site. Just type in your content, choose your images and arrange things up – pushing the “Publish” button will have your site created for you.
Weebly is not really a blog builder, so if what you want is to build a business blog easier, you might want to consider WordPress and any other WordPress-powered free blog hosting sites.
Just like WordPress.com, you can buy a domain name and have it linked to your Weebly site address.
There are some other free blog/web site builder and hosting I use – Blogger.com, Vox.com, Blog.com, Posterous.com and some others – but I personally recommend the three above for the more user-friendly interface, simplicity and convenience.
Many resent free blog/web site hosting because providers usually limit what users can do with their sites. Moreover, as a member, you will get a sub-domain name – i.e. yourbusinessname.wordpress.com – which is not really effective for business branding purpose. However, I consider free site hosting as a great place to minimise your business spending, to support your Internet marketing and business branding campaigns and/or to have a look-see on what an effective business blog/web sites should look and do.
What’s your choice of free blog/web site hosting?
Ivan Widjaya
I love freebies
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I have established my own blog in wordpress.com. Thank you so much for your information. I think my business will be wider from now on.
Great post! I want to add my personal favorite to the list.
For those who have no programming experience and want to build a professional website quickly that grows with their business, I would highly recommend http://webs.com . Over 50 million websites have been built on the Webs.com, which has the most extensive suite of applications and widgets that you can add to your website to customize it to your needs. Things such as blogs, photo albums, videos, wiki’s, forums, forms, voicemail, appointment scheduler, membership, payment form, shopping carts and many many more Apps can be added to your Webs website with a simple click.
you can build and host your website in minutes for FREE on Webs.com. There is also a paid subscription version of Webs.com for those who want to get their own custom URL (such as “yourbusinessname.com”) and to remove advertising from your pages.
Check it out at http://webs.com
P.S. I work at Webs.com, but before I joined the company, I was already a user and fan :)
Touraj,
Cheers for the tip – webs.com is cool and I’ll give a try soon :)
wordpress is powerfull blog
Another great website building service is Microsoft Office Live Small Business. It is very inexpensive to get your own custom domain name ($15/yr). It is also free of ads, which cannot be said of many free website hosting sites. Office Live Small Business is also very easy to use because it is template-based (so no knowledge of code is necessary).
To learn more about Office Live Small Business, check out http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/en-us/.
Cheers,
Isabella
MSFT Office Live Outreach Team
Heru,
Apa kabar?
WordPress is so powerful, indeed!
Isabella,
Thanks for the tip!