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Building And Hosting A Website For Free It is possible to build and host a web site for free, for many people this is a great way to have a personal web presence, for a commercial site it is probably better to find a reliable paid host. Sites like Doteasy.com offers a free service to get you started and has a plan where the services can be increased as you need them. To get started with Doteasy.com just go to their site, select a domain name if you don't already have one, then follow the instructions to build your free site. If you plan to have a commercial site it may be advisable to to do some reasearch into the services offered, whether it is a free or paid hosting service. It is not easy to move from one host to another later, there is always that dead time during the transition that your site is offline which may come back to haunt you when you are dropped from a major search engine because your site could not be found, or sites linking to you check the link and delete their dead links. 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, much of the information is dated but still valid: Your Domain Name You can find free hosts and free programs to build your site but you definately should register 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. Often free domains will be in the form of "yourname.hostingcompany.com", where basically they still own the name and are letting you use it. 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. Hosting Select a host that offers expansion as your site grows, at Doteasy.com for example, you can sign up for free site, then as your site grows you can upgrade to a paid plan. Some sites offer free sites with advertising banners, then remove them if you upgrade to a paid plan. Having a reliable host is critical to establishing a credible presence on the web. You must be able to get support quickly when you need it, generally the most efficient method is being able to contact them by phone, to avoid the tag game of emails back and forth. Can you expand the features of your site, for example does your host run on Apache, or have a work around so you can easily use SSI when designing your navigation system at a later date without changing all your URL's. Building The Page Every web page is built with html code that tells a browser what to show the viewer, this code can be done by hand or with applications that write the code for you. See more about web basics on this page. Nvu is a free application based on the Mozilla engine, Linux, Windows and Mac versions are offered here. Visit the Nvu Forum to see what others think about it. One of the best commercial applications is Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 Customizing Your Page Resize and optimize a jpg. file for your site. Put an icon in your visitors bookmarks. Stop spambots from stealing your email address. 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. Selling Merchandise On Your Site How to have customers pay by credit card and have downloadable items on 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. Purchase ad space on established sites, space is available for less than $1.00 per day 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.
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Additional Info
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a very comprehensive tool for building compex sites, relatively expensive, generally suited for advanced webmasters. 
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