If you’re in businesses, the need to have a website is almost as important as the need to have a phone. The customer has to be able to find you to buy from you. However, if you are looking to build a website for your business, and are tempted by the opportunity to build your own site for free, read on.
If you do a search in Google for “free websites” you will discover many companies offering that service. So what’s the catch? Since these companies still need to make money, if you are not giving any to them, you will probably be giving them advertising revenue instead, by having banner ads appearing on your site. For some people this is not a bad trade-off, but if you are a business, you may lose some credibility advertising the fact that you built your site for free.
Your business name for the web is also very important. Having your company name attached to a free website provider’s name, like “yourname.websitebuildername.com” is definitely not advisable. Registering your own Domain Name is not expensive and definitely worth getting. A short name that is easy to remember is ideal, but finding a name that is still available can be quite difficult. Keep in mind, free website builder companies charge extra for you to use your own domain.
The look of your site should not be taken lightly, since this is likely to be your customer’s first impression of your business. Some free website builders have a great selection of beautiful templates to choose from, but most keep the simple basic templates for free users and the more professional looking ones for the paying customers.
Another factor to consider is being able to edit your site. Many of the “Build it yourself, without knowing HTML” sites offer WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get) editors. The advantage to using them is being able to edit your site at any time without paying a web developer. The downside is some features you want may not be possible to implement, depending on which builder you are using. Another problem with creating a website using a WYSIWYG editor is it creates a lot of code which can slow down load times. Also, if for some reason you want to move your site to a different host provider, it may not be possible since most of these editors create proprietary website code.
An increasingly popular option for creating a website is to build it using a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress. This software program is Open Source (free), and allows users to create and manage their site without knowing HTML. With WordPress, you can select a simple template, and have some basic functionality, like adding images to your page. Also, when you have a budget that allows for paid hosting, you can either continue to have it hosted on WordPress.com, or move your site to another host like BlueHost, GoDaddy or Hostgator etc. However, if you go with Wix or some of the other WYSIWYG options, you cannot move your site to another web hosting company.
There is another option which may work and is completely free. It is from a company called Carrd. You get a free name that is not too bad, for example: yourname.carrd.co, and even though there is a Carrd company logo on your web page, it is very small and at the bottom. The site uses drag and drop technology so no coding is required, however it is only one page. One very important item to consider with using Carrd is website SEO. It would be next to impossible to get this site to rank well on Google.
In my opinion, the two best free options for most websites is either Wix or WordPress.com. They can help you get a website up and running in minutes, and you can continue to add content to your website as your business grows. However, I strongly encourage you to move to a paid version as soon as possible, because you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
For this reason, if you are willing to consider building your website on a paid platform, there is an option I would like to recommend based on my research, which is using the website builder by Hostinger. It is not free, however, it offers a paid solution that is less expensive than Wix and easier to build and maintain than a self hosted WordPress site.
………………………………………
If you want to view a couple of videos I found that covers this topic, click here or click here.