How to create a free website

admin » 25 September 2008 » In Web developer tips »

There are few shortcuts in life, except when it comes to creating a website. To skip all the knowledge and technical know-how required to manually set up a website, we bring you shortcut #1Free Web Hosting and shortcut #2 Free CSS Web Templates. Using these two components will save you a lot of time scratching your head, ultimately resulting in a website with a proper domain name and a proper web design.

Free Web Hosting

No joke. You can get free web hosting. If you need to get your site up now and have no money left to spend on your web projects, this may be a good option. The web host pays for the service by putting ads on your site. While this will get you up and running, it is disadvantageous in that in addition to having to advertise for the web host, you may have severe limitations with respect to bandwidth and disk space.

Almost Free Web Hosting

Almost free web hosting is a nice medium. You can get web hosting services for only a few dollars a month, without any ads from the host service on your site. There will still be some limitations on disk space and bandwidth, but an almost free web hosting arrangement is definitely enough to get you started until you are ready to upgrade. Also known as cheap web hosting or shared web hosting, this hosting type is indeed perfect for the beginner webmaster or hobbyist. You will hence share server disk space and bandwidth with other hosting clients but as long as your website isn’t heavy with loads of traffic and large files, there shouldn’t be a problem.

Free CSS Web Templates

Now in most hosting packages nowadays clients are offered in-house applications to install CMS, blogs, forums or other website-types so that the client won’t have to. Pre-installable Wordpress blogs are common as is Mambo, Joomla and PHP Nuke. However, these solutions still require knowledge in the scripting language PHP and some level of experience. If you are a first-timer you should keep to basic html and css.

One index.html-file, one image directory, one css stylesheet. Css web templates are built in basic html and css, though not limiting the web design in any way and are failry easy to manage and edit. Online you’ll find massive archives of free css web templates of just a couple of files that you can upload to your shared server. You’ll have to edit your website’s content directly in the html-files but that way you’ll also learn some basic programming. When you later feel ready to create a more dynamic website like a content management system, you will be more ready to take on the world of PHP programming and finding free CMS templates.