Friday, July 17, 2009
I created this blog to share my experience in building a free web site. I have been checking some different free hosting/building sites for a while now, and I figure why not share my opinions about some of them.
A few years back I started a tennis league in my home town and needed to create a simple web site to post league's schedule, results, standings rules etc. As I started surfing the web for tools to build a free web site I have found out that there is always a catch with whatever you are getting for free. There are a lot of web building sites out there that offer free option aside from their premium services that you have to pay for.
Free builders have always some restrictions for example :
1. Free plan allows you to create only so many pages on your site.
2. Free plan lets you build a site for free but they display annoying banner adds on your site
3. Free plan gives you a subdomain ex. http://www.yourname.companyname.com/. They don't let you use a domain you bought elsewhere (http://www.yourname.com/) unless you purchase their premium plan.
4.Although you get a lot of templates to choose from, some sites don't let you customize them (for example you can't change the header image)
5.Free plans restrict use of some tools (for example to build forms you have to purchase premium plan)
I checked out a few of these sites that advertise free web building tools and hosting and I found out that they have very easy to use web builders. I didn't know anything about creating web sites when I started, and these programs make it very easy. They are click and drag , what you see is what you get type of programs. For creating a simple web site they are sufficient. Most providers give you access to a large number of different templates , you get more than enough storage space and bandwidth. Some even don't have advertisements or banners, and I also found that most give you enough pages.
Here is a list of things I usually look for :
-Free site, I am looking for a free host with most features . I don't want to pay for hosting or creating a site. Most I am willing to pay is domain name registration.-Web builder that is easy to use but still good enough to customize your pages and make them look nice. Builder that allows you to change header image.
-No adds or banners
-Free plan that gives you enough pages for your site
-Good templates. This part is very important to me. For example if I find a template with a nice tennis theme I will try to work with that program and see if I can build a sufficient site for my tennis league. The rest of the things (like banners on the site) I might be able to live with. Again it all depends how professional you want your site to look. For a small business web site you shouldn't really have banners or sub domains..
-Free host that allows you to use your domain name you bought elsewhere without having to upgrade to paid hosting plan. I found this to be very hard to find but there are some sites that give you this option. Most offer you to buy a premium service and your personalized domain will come with the plan.
So let me share my experience with some of the free hosting/web building providers
Webs (http://www.webs.com/)
As I was looking to build my tennis league web site I found webs.com . It had a nice tennis theme template and I ended up settling with them.It has a very easy to use builder, you get 20 pages for one web site which was just enough for my site. Webs lets you change logo but you can't change header image on your template . They have many extra features, like blog, forum, image gallery, video gallery etc.Webs does have banner add on the top of the page if you have their free plan. You are not allowed to use a domain name you purchased somewhere else unless you pay for premium plan.Customer support is not great and web editor has gone down a few times in last 3 years. They usually fix problems or post instructions on how to fix them. I think they are lacking direct customer support . I couldn't figure out how to send a ticket to support.
I am always looking for a better program but as of now I am still with Webs because they give me a very user friendly builder , a great template for my tennis league and enough pages. They also have integrated Clicky program for measuring your site's traffic, ability to manage multiple sites from one dashboard, .
http://www.moonfruit.com/
I was very excited when I tried Moonfruit , for a few days I though I found something even better than webs.com. They have an excellent builder that lets customize your page, header, menu and pretty much everything on there. It has a tons of extra stuff integrated like form builder, blog, . Another amazing thing was that they don't have banner adds on free sites, and you can use your own domain that you purchased elsewhere. To my knowledge only Yola.com has this . They let you have 15 pages for a free plan and that seemed very good but the catch is that they limit page lenght to ridiculously small size so you are very limited on how much content you can put on each page. For me this was a deal breaker. I started posting questions on their site about this issue and other short falls of this program like lack of ability to paste HTML code. This is due to them being a flash builder so they can't do it, but there is beta version of a HTML snippet that let you paste some code, for example I was able to paste a code for clicky (site stats program) .
After some initial posts on their forum , they started responding very quickly to explain how I could go around these shortfalls. They told me how to extend the page length so I get longer pages . They got longer but they won't be unlimited length like for example webs.com. Their support was awesome even for a free plan user. They are very prompt at answering questions and I think I am getting hooked on moonfruit. They have tons of stuff you can install like forum, blog, forms, members log in pages, register pages, contact us form, etc. Right now only thing that is making me stay with webs.com is lack of pay pal integration without having a premium paid hosting plan with them. Free plan doesn't let you integrate their sellers tool for pay pal and even though they told me I could paste pay pal button using their beta version HTML snipped my multiple tries were unsuccessful. I really hope they come up with some kind of a solution for this.
Their web builder is awesome, you can use your own domain which is 6.99 at 1 and 1 hosting , no forced adds on the site make moonfruit very good choice. Main shortfall is HTML code pasting which is very limited with their current beta version tool. Positive experience with their support gives me a reason to be optimistic that they will fix this somehow in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment