Building My Own Web Presence – Episode 02: Finding a Free Provider: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
On my quest for a free and easy way to build my own website the first step was to find a provider. There were certain criteria I had in mind including the following: Easy to find, No necessity to download anything, Providing the all-in-one package: hosting, editing, the whole shebang, and of course: no costs whatsoever!
I was looking specifically for providers enabling me to create entire websites, rather than ‘just’ a blog.This automatically ruled out the great and famous Wordpress and Blogger.
I chose three different services that sounded promising and fit the criteria above. I tried setting up a simple structure of a homepage including my picture, some text and links to my Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles.
And here are the tales of my success odyssey:
01. Own Free Website
I was intrigued by the name and thought maybe door number 1 will hold the key to my own free website. The hope was in the name – and stayed there. After a quick registration process I was able to get right down to business. Trying to edit the layout of my page I was given the choice between 23 different designs, out of which 11 were already labelled as ‘unpopular’. Interesting. I went with the ‘popular Iceblue’ design as I couldn’t find an option to upload my own background image. I further had the option to add some bits and pieces of text and the masterpiece of a website was done.
They definitely lived up to their promise of letting me create my own free website in 3 minutes. However, for our purposes the editing functions are a bit too basic, although I’m sure it is something worth mentioning to my 13-year-old nephew.
02. Free Web Space
Free Web Space has a pretty plain looking website, but I thought you never know what’s behind door number 2, so better try it out before judging.
I found all the basic features I was looking for, giving me the choice of free sub domain hosting – which I had already made my peace with – various online site builders and the option to edit the HTML directly.
The site builder – in this case Pagewizard – was easy to use, more or less intuitive and I could add everything I wanted on my homepage. Links where easily addable, however, not very customizable – at least not from what I could see on first glance.
After a couple of minutes my basic structure was ready to be published. Here’s a direct comparison between the page as I saw it in the site builder and what you can find online when you check the my website:
Lovely. I had expected ads but that was a bit too much, or am I just being overly sensitive? A bit frustrated I moved on to the next project.
03. Tripod
Now here was a name I had heard before, which is always a good sign. The Tripod homepage looks definitely more professional than the other ones and it was followed by an equally professional and quick registration process. The available features include different kinds of building tools depending on your level of skill, design templates that are actually not half bad and a database of free images, cliparts and other things that you can add to your site for free.
The basic site builder I chose was easy to use and quite intuitive. I found right away how to add images and how to use these as links. The final product still has ads on it, of course, but actually looks almost decent:
So here we have them, the good, the bad and the ugly – in reversed order.
However, looking at the Tripod page actually reminds me a bit lot of the Blogger account I set up ages ago. Maybe I should reconsider my options.
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