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Building And Hosting A Website For Free There are a lot of sites out there offering free hosting and online tools to build your site, I would like to suggest an alternate approach where you will have complete control as to a what your site will look like and who hosts your site. Having a reliable host is critical to establishing a credible presence on the web, you must be able to switch to another provider if necessary. Before building your site, for that matter before hiring someone else to build one for you read and heed what it says on this site: Hosting I recommend and use Netfirms Web Hosting as a host, they offer a free service to get you started and have incremental premium plans where the services can be increased as you need them. To get started with Netfirms click on their banner and sign up for the free package, you may have to look at the bottom of their page to find the link. If you don't wish to purchase a domain name you can get a subdomain name, it will be in the form of "yourname.netfirms.com", unfortunately you can not use it for e-mail, but for a start it may be adequate. Building The Page If you have never built a page before and are not fimiliar with how things work read "The Basics Of A Web Site" before you start. Included in the package when you sign up wth Netfirms Web Hosting To get started right away you can use Composer which is part of Netscape's older free browsers, if you don't already have a copy you can download 7.X or 4.X versions of it for free here. This is an easy to use WYSIWYG application that works very much like a word processing program. I did my first web page with it years ago, then easily migrated to Claris Home Page and finally to Abobe Golive, each step up the ladder seemed like a natural progression. Composer has a very good help section, I printed out the instructions for the various functions as I needed them and put the pages in a three ring binder so I could refer to back to them. Nvu is another free application with more features than Composer that is based on the same Mozilla engine that Composer uses. It is available here, Linux, Windows and Mac versions are offered. Visit the Nvu Forum to see what others think about it. Customizing Your Page Put an icon in your visitors bookmarks. Place a subject in email message orginating from your page. Use free scripts for calculators, calendars, forms and more on your site. Opening A Page In A New Window Have a page linked from your site open in a new window so the visitor will end up back at your site. Getting The Word Out Building your site is only half the battle, now you need to let people know it is out there. There are still some search engines that you can submit your site to for free, it may take months to get listed, some offer quicker listings for a price. Visit discussion groups relative to the theme of your site, if there is content on your site that would be a helpful contribution to a topic post a link to your site. Be careful here you don't want to come on too strong and have this come across as spam. Develop a links page and trade links with other sites that have a common theme to yours. Include your domain name on your business cards and in any newspaper or magazine ads you run. Going Beyond Free Your Domain Name You can find free hosts and free programs to build your site but you definately should buy a domain name. This will be your online identity, as search engines find and list your site you do not want to loose this valuable asset and have to start over with another name. When you own your name you have a permanent email address, unlike the one from your internet provider that will change if you change providers. There are sites that offer free domain names however they may retain the rights to them and it is sometimes difficult and expensive to get the rights to it if you want to leave them for another host. If you want to do this entire exercise for free, Netfirms offers a free subdomain name, it will be in the form of "yourname.netfirms.com", unfortunately you can not use it for email, but in some circumstances it may be adequate. Just bear in mind that it takes a lot of work and time to get your site listed with search engines so it is better to start off with a name that you will have forever.
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