Yola, Weebly, Webstarts and Wix are four of the most popular tools for creating free websites. Each of these free website builders makes it easy to establish a professional looking site to serve as your home base in social media.
As Web 2.0 services, they also integrate well with other online tools, such as blogs, wikis and social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
All four use pre-designed templates to let you create free pages with no design skills or coding knowledge required. You can basically click on any design you like, then drag and drop images to give the site your own look and feel. All four offer free hosting, which means they "host" or store your pages on the Internet.
None requires special knowledge of Web publishing. You fill out their forms with the text you want to appear on your pages, upload any photos you want to display from your computer, and then click "publish'' or "submit" to publish your website.
What you don't get for free is an original Web address--your site won't be located at yourname.com, for example, unless you are willing to pay a little extra. Another downside is that these services often show ads on your pages, which is how they pay the bills for the free publishing.
Four Top Website Builders and Their Key Features
Weebly.com -- Weebly offers one of the best deals because its free version has no limits on the number of pages, or on how much data (text and images) can be stored, or on how much bandwidth/traffic the site can consume. You can buy an original domain for a fee or configure your own domain to work with a free Weebly site. Weebly optimizes its pages for display on smart phones and offers integration with other blogging services and social networks.
Yola -- Yola's free version limits storage to one gigabyte of data, and individual file sizes to 15 megabytes. The $99-a-year "silver" service raises the data storage limit to 5 gigabytes and the individual file limit to 100 megabytes.
Webstarts -- The free version of Webstarts offers up to five pages and 10 megabytes of storage for text and images. To create unlimited pages, no ads on pages, and an original domain or Web address, the premium fee is $7.16 a month.
Wix.com -- Wix specializes in Flash-based websites, which means its pages are created using Adobe's popular interactive design software called Flash. Its free sites allow unlimited pages but have storage and traffic limits--200 megabytes of file storage and 500 megabytes of bandwidth a month.
Wix sites tend to look hip and cool, but also are bandwidth-intensive, so their pages typically take longer to load. Designers and artists tend to love pages that use Flash, while business-oriented publishers often shy away from them.
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