How to Build a Free Website

The rules for running a business are rapidly changing and evolving. Having a domain name and web site, now more than ever, are becoming essential for establishing an online presence for your business. A web site gives your consumer a way to find your business and products online. What is even better, your site is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and is a mere browser click away anytime they wish to visit. Instead of being locked into only the immediate area, the whole world's buying pool becomes your personal marketplace. Customers can access information about your products and no salesperson is necessary. No more waiting in lines and everyone has access immediately.

The domain name of the website gives a powerful digital branding to the business. Having a domain name is like having an address and unlimited emails can be added to the name so different departments can be reached without having to wait. For example, sales@widgets.com will put the shopper in direct contact with the sales department.

Getting a website and domain name is an easy, simple, cost-effective process. You can register your domain name through web domain registrars like Go-Daddy.com or Netfirms.com for as low as $1.99 per year. There is only a limited risk compared to opening a store, renting a location, and the thousands of dollars involved in overhead costs.
Advantages of your Own Domain Name
- Easier for people to find your business.
- Gives your business a more professional image
- You can keep the name for years to come
- You can move the name to another ISP if desired.
- Easier to get your site registered with search engines
- Better position in some search engine listings

Like any trade name, logo, or brand name, your domain name represents a part of your business identity - something customers and business associates can recognize.

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

Build a Website with a Web Template

Many online sites offer free web templates which make website building a lot faster and easier that building a site from scratch. If you are willing to learn a little HTML and how to use an editor, building your website using a pre-built web template can save you a lot of time and effort.

Using a template is very easy as all or most of the design and layout is already done for you. All you have to do is add content such as text and pictures into the provided spaces and you are ready to publish your page. Detailed instructions are provided on the template websites that apply to the specific templates being offered.

Here are a few free template sites to get you started.

Free Website Templates

Build Your Own Website

Building a website with a web template

Free Site Templates

Hosting is vital to any business on the Internet. Having the right hosting plan will attract more leads, and has the potential of making more sales. Veretekk now offers enterprise level hosting at the Gold membership level. Veretekk Silver still costs nothing to join, and the full featured Gold version is also free for the first 30 days, so you can try it with no obligation whatsoever. Veretekk Cpanel Hosting is Top Notch

At the low price of $54.95 a month, the Gold upgrade now includes Cpanel hosting. The advent of real integration has made this hosting system unparalleled anywhere else on the Internet. Highest-level professionalism combined with the power of simple click and produce Veretekk powered websites is now made possible for even the novice with this service. For new marketers this is an additional plus as blogs can be created quickly, which makes the process of adding keyword specific content simple and easy

What is a keyword? It can be any word found on a webpage; but using any word would be disastrous for search engine traffic purposes. Doing a web search for the word "the" illustrates the point. Nearly every web page written in English would contain the word "the" but searching for it would not be helpful at all since Google estimates 25 billion pages contain the word. Keywords are not limited to one word only, but can be used as 1, 2, 3 or even 4 or more word combinations to describe and define a specific search. For example, the word "bicycle" describes a specific item in one word, but "lady's 10-Speed lightweight touring bike" is much more descriptive and produces much more targeted results.

To be a good keyword, the word or phrase should have a direct correlation to the content of the page to help searchers find that specific page out of the millions of pages available. Good keyword research involves more than just description. Once you have described what searchers will find on your page, a further step involves researching to see how many times your term is actually searched for to insure that you pick the most popular terms. As an example, take the two terms, 10 speed bicycles and 10 speed bikes. Most people would agree that the terms mean the same thing and are interchangeable. Using Google Adwords Keyword tool, 10 speed bicycles receives 9900 monthly searches however 10 speed bikes receives 12,100, or about 20% more searches. Keyword research can make a big difference in your website traffic.

Another aspect of keyword research involves determining how many sites are in competition for a given keyword phrase. To illustrate, using Google search page, I searched for each of the bicycle terms from above. I found that 10 speed bicycles had about 61 million results; however 10 speed bikes produced about 834 million results. In effect, there is about 15 times more competition for bike than bicycle. When I searched for the long-tailed keyword "lady's 10-Speed lightweight touring bike", there were about 621, 000 results. In general, using highly targeted keyword phrases will bring you less overall traffic but your visitors will arrive looking for exactly what your website has to offer

Your website is where your business resides-it's like the headquarters of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Make sure your website complies with web standards at w3.org and make sure it is cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.