How to Make Your Own Free Website: And Your Free Blog Too
by Jason Matthews
Copyright © 2010 Jason Matthews, updated 2012. All rights reserved.
Preliminary Questions and Remarks
Think about some of the questions you might have before getting started. Do you want a website or a blog or both, and do you understand the difference between the two? Will you need to learn more about computers or know any HTML coding? What would be a good domain name for your site? How will you drive traffic to visit? How will you optimize your SEO rankings with Google? Will you sell products or need PayPal buttons? Will you have multiple pages, and will some of them have special functions like a forum or contact form?
These are just some of the questions you're likely to come across along the way. I'm going to discuss each of these and many other topics in this book.
The most important aspect for building websites and blogs, for those who aren't computer experts and want to keep it simple, is to use free hosting sites that come with "site-building" software. This is a built-in program allowing you, the designer, to easily manage a template and add the elements to webpages that you'll need to accomplish goals.
I stumbled across these things just a short time ago while waiting for the last professional webdesigner to build a site for me. I was goofing around online and discovered a place where anyone could create a site for free. And so I made a "mock version" of the site I was presently hiring out for. In just a few hours, it amazed me to see a perfectly functioning site of what I was trying to do. It came together fairly easily, it cost nothing, it worked, and I had done everything myself.
Just to make things clear, I don't know advanced HTML coding (webpage language), and no one has to learn this anymore to create a website. Yes, you could learn advanced HTML if you really want to and I'll be teaching some of the basics. But many people don't have the time or patience for that, and the good news is they don't have to. With site-building software at your fingertips, anyone can easily create her/his own functional and professional looking website.
But before we get to all of the instruction that follows, let me mention a few things. First, the order in which you do the coming tips is not meant to be in any sequence. You can do them in several orders and still succeed. This is just my recommendation, what I've found from experience to make sense. Some of you may not need much advice on social media links, for example, and so you may want to skim those parts. I also recommend you read through this entirely before getting entrenched in any one area. It's not a big book but it's jam-packed with information. Reading through it once entirely will give you a clearer idea on the whole scheme of things before you get started. Or if you want to jump right in, you can actually follow these steps like a manual and it will still work just fine. The order is really up to you.
Secondly, I'm going to present you with a wealth of information. For some, most of this will be new; for others there will be parts that feel like a review. All of it has to do with online methods for accomplishing your goals, so those who are less familiar with the internet and their computers may at times feel overwhelmed. Not to worry, feeling overwhelmed by this is a natural response and something I've experienced plenty of times. (You may want to copy that last line and paste it on your computer as a reminder.) I totally understand. There will be moments where it seems like a ton of new things to learn and do. For those who feel inundated by this, please think of it as a diet or exercise program. All you need to do is a little bit each day. Don't worry about trying to accomplish everything at once. The fact is this; it will probably take weeks to accomplish a majority of the following tips. So just take it day by day, getting a few things done at a time. Follow these tips, and I promise that you'll create a totally free website and/or blog that does the things you want and receives traffic from all over the world.
There are always tutorials that will go into great detail on any one of these tips I'm about to share. YouTube.com is an excellent place to watch videos that explain more fully how to do these things. I will touch on them all, some in more depth than others, but if you still need extra info just go to YouTube or do an internet search with "tutorial on the subject you're looking for." I do this frequently, even for the research to write this book.
Finally, you're going to create accounts at websites with new usernames, passwords, images, files, all kinds of things that could become a really scattered mess across your brain and computer. It will be seriously helpful to get organized from the start. Create a new folder and call it something like, "yourownfreewebsite," where you can store everything related to this process. Keep it on your desktop for easy access. Here's how to create a new folder:
Go to your desktop and place the cursor in empty space.
Right click your mouse and drag down to New and then Folder and choose it. It creates one.
You can rename it by clicking the cursor over the letters. Name it "yourownfreewebsite" and use it to store all the new stuff we're going to be creating so that you can easily access it in the future.
Website or Blog, What's the Difference?
What's the difference between a blog and a website? Great question. Actually there's not a lot of difference at some level. I like to think of my blog as my dynamic, ever-changing, up to the minute site while my webpage is more of a set piece that only changes occasionally. Characteristics that set most blogs apart from websites are: entries are a series of posts, they're arranged by date, they usually have comment boxes for visitors, often an RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication) or subscription link, previous posts are categorized by month and archived, and they often don't have an email account associated with them.
Blogs don't have to be updated regularly; they're just designed to do so easily. They can have totally static pages and function very much like a website. Both blogs and websites are extremely important, and both can be acquired and easily designed for free. If you only have the time or energy to get one up and running, however, you may want to make it a blog (for the dynamic aspects) and we'll build your website later.
A lot of people have no idea how important a blog site can be to their online platform. You can think of your blog as your home base, the one area that leads to everything else online about you. Just as you evolve, so does the blog. At the blog site you can have as much personal information as you want, plus it can be updated regularly to provide links to all the other websites that matter. In my opinion a blog site is essential for everyone, a place to add regular updates about you, your business or anything else. Fortunately, there are excellent free places to create a blog.
Notice for the free domain name your site will have a URL (website address) like http://yourdomainname.wordpress.com or http://yourdomainname.blogspot.com instead of simply http://yourdomainname.com, but it really doesn't matter. The majority of people click links to get to websites; they don't have to manually type or remember a URL's name. (Except in examples like this book where some of the readers will have to retype the links. I know I just contradicted myself, but it's true. Your domain name can be really long these days because most people will visit it with a click of the mouse.) And if that still bugs you, for a small fee like $10/year, the suffix can be removed and it will just contain http://www.yourdomainname.com.
There are dozens and dozens of options for venues to create a free blog and/or website. There are even more hosting companies that can provide space for your sites. However, unless you know or want to learn HTML coding it will be necessary to build a website and/or a blog that has everything provided plus an easy to use site-building program. For those who really want to make a site from scratch, I'll be talking about how to do that with a program called Kompozer in a later chapter called Other Things You Can Do. The advice for all the widgets, hyperlinks, SEO tips, shopping cart, PayPal buttons and everything else will still be handy to learn for the Kompozer people. For the rest of us, having a site-building program makes it so much easier.
That's the key which makes it possible for anyone to do this: a site-building program. If you're familiar with writing software like Microsoft Word, or the Mac or Microsoft Paint programs, or even if you've designed a Facebook or MySpace page, then you can easily work with a site-building program. And if you haven't used those things yet, you can do this. There are tons of online tutorials at these venues and at YouTube, and I'll be giving plenty of basics as well.
Before we begin building a website and blog, you'll have to decide on a URL domain name. It's among the first thing these companies will ask for and once you choose a URL name, that's a done deal. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator which is fancy talk for your website's address, like http://www.example.com. Of course, you can always use a 301 permanent redirect or create an entirely new site with a different URL later if you don't like the name, but you can't change your URL as easily as you can rename a folder, file or document. It can be done, but because of the efforts involved it's best to come up with the great name from the start.
Before you run off and create any website or blog, take some quality time (as in hours or even days) to think about and research the domain name you'd like. It might be catchy while conveying some aspects of you, your book or business. It will also help dramatically with search engines if the words within the URL domain name are related to any possible internet search terms for someone looking for what you have to offer. As an example, let's say you build and sell solar powered birdbaths with little fountains and heated water for cold winter days. (These things actually exist.) You were thinking of naming the website cutelittlebirdiebath.com. While it's an adorable name, nobody ever searches that term on Google and therefore that name won't help with people who are searching for your product. A smarter named would be solarbirdbath.com or something similar. Perhaps it's more boring, but that would help a bunch if someone wanted a solar powered birdbath with a fountain and heated water, and so they went searching online by typing the phrase "solar birdbath." Hard to believe, but it's actually a term which gets typed into Google searches 8,100 times per month (Jan. 2012). As for the plural of the phrase, "solar birdbaths," that only gets searched 2,900 times a month in comparison or about 28% as much. Based on this data, it would be smarter to name your site solarbirdbath.com than solarbirdbaths.com. Surprisingly, the "s" at the end makes a difference with search engines, which attempt to give searchers exactly what they're seeking.
A little homework is mandatory to discover which terms and phrases related to your website title will be searched the most and how much competition from other advertisers exists already. How did I come up with those statistics and how will you do similar research?
By using Google Keyword Tool External and researching keywords in general. This advice is not just for naming websites but for quick homework before anything you post online (product description, blog titles and text body, articles, press releases, etc).
It's my belief that keywords are essential to help search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing link any webpage to certain words, terms or phrases. There are literally hundreds of search engines the world over, but you only need to focus on the big three. (Actually, if you only focused on Google, you'd be okay here, or if you live it Asia—focus on Baidu.) It's best to add keywords to every site, blog and location that has boxes for them: keywords that describe the content of what your site is about. And, as shown above, you can even figure out ways to include keywords in your domain name.
For example, let me explain how I came to decide on the title for this book and the websites. The book is entirely focused on teaching others to create free websites and blogs. During the initial brainstorming sessions, I wrote down the major keywords and phrases that came to mind. Here's the partial list:
Create free website
Build free website
Make free website
Make free site
How to build free sites
Create free blog
Make a free blog
How to make free websites
Make my own website
Make your own website
My free blog
Your free website
And so on and so on. The very next step is to go to Google Keyword Tool External https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. There you can input these phrases individually or altogether and get valuable feedback from Google on which search terms are used the most and how much competition exists from other advertisers. By comparing each of these plus the synonyms, or similar terms Google automatically provides, it becomes clear which keywords should work the best over time.
Back to our example. By comparing extremely similar phrases like "create free website," to "build free website" and "make free website," Google told me that "make" and "create" had more searches than "build" when followed by "free website." I also learned that "website" is more commonly searched than "site" and "blog" when following "make free." Another revelation was that "your" was much more commonly searched than "my" when mixed with these other words. I also wanted to include the word "own" because it implies ownership. Turns out "your free website" gets searched 165,000 times per month while "your own free website" gets 90,500 searches (Jan. 2012). After some deciding, that's a difference I can live with for a word that helps the title have more power for the consumer. Making sense?
In less than an hour I had narrowed my book title and website URL down to these possibilities:
Make your own free website
How to make your own free website
Your own free website
I checked the competition from other advertisers, which is also included in the Keyword Tool results. It turns out when comparing "make your own free website" to "your own free website," they had identical monthly searches and similar competition from other advertisers, so this left the decision up to me and I prefer to go with fewer words when possible.
Then I checked name availability at both Godaddy and the websites where I wanted to create free examples for this book. Although this domain name was not available at Godaddy as a pure dot com, it was available at the venues to create my examples. And so I went ahead and registered it as yourownfreewebsite.webs.com and yourownfreewebsite.yolasite.com. (Know this; it doesn't matter if you have a long domain name. People click links to visit sites so your domain can be long.)
Additionally I battled with whether to use dashes, underscores or nothing to separate the words in the URL. Should the site be called your-own-free-website, or your_own_free_website or simply yourownfreewebsite? All of the research indicated that Google would find my site just fine in any case since they have such a complex algorithm with over 200 variables for detecting keywords, so this really boils down to personal preference. In the end I liked it this way, your-own-free-website.com because I believe it's the easiest to read. Remember, you don't have to use dashes or underscores for Google to find the keywords in a URL. For that site I spent a few bucks to have the custom domain name without the extra suffix, though for demonstration purposes I also created your-own-free-website.webs.com to show others not to worry about the extra suffix.
Finally, I wanted to name the book, How to Make Your Own Free Website. In November of 2010, I went to Amazon and typed that exact phrase into a book search. I was delighted to see that no one had a book with that title. Surprisingly, there were very few titles even close to it, so I knew this would be a great name for people to find not only my website but my Amazon book as well. Since that time, a few books have been released with almost identical titles, which reinforced my belief that it was a smart title. (I included the subtitle for those who wanted more info on blogs and the title became, How to Make Your Own Free Website: And Your Free Blog Too. This way the keywords are part of the URL address plus the book title, and over time people will certainly find it with search engine terms. Perhaps you're reading this book and that's how you found it.
So take your time not only brainstorming for names but also using Google Keyword Tool External to research the intelligence of your options. Ideally you can find some keywords that have low competition from other advertisers and high numbers of searches from users each month.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Remember to also check its availability as purely a .com, as in solarbirdbath.com, because someday you may want to spend a few bucks and make the conversion. Name availability is easy to check at many places including Godaddy - http://www.godaddy.com/. If you find the perfect name for your website and a registrar like Godaddy confirms that it is available, then you might want to spend around $10 per year to reserve that domain name even if you're not ready to install it. The reason is so it will be there when it's needed, and no one can take it from you. Even if the dot com is not available, there are also options like solarbirdbath.info, solarbirdbath.net, solarbirdbath.biz and solarbirdbath.me.
Next step, let's look at website and blogging hosts with site-building software.
This concludes the free sample of this book. To read more please go to http://your-own-free-website.webs.com/buythebook.htm or http://your-own-free-website.com/book-store.php.
Also available at Amazon Kindle, Amazon paperback, Barnes & Noble Nook, Barnes & Noble paperback, Apple iBookstore and Smashwords.
See all of my paperbacks and ebooks at my Amazon author's page.About the Author
Jason Matthews was born in North Carolina in 1967. He graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in ’90 with a degree in film and television. He lives in Truckee, California with his wife, Jana, and daughters, Shelby and Devan. They enjoy soccer, skiing, Texas Hold’em and rooting for the Tarheels. He can be contacted through his websites, thelittleuniverse.com, your-own-free-website.webs.com, your-own-free-website.com and ebooksuccess4free.webs.com.
Other Books by Jason Matthews
How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks All for Free - a How To book for those that want much more specifics on the ebook business.
Get On Google Front Page - SEO made easy, 20 simple steps to get any site or blog to the top of Google search results.
The Little Universe - a novel.
Jim's Life - a sequel novel.
All of these books are available at major retailers as paperbacks and ebooks. Find them at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords and Apple iBookstore.
Google Plus - https://plus.google.com/117850331447734054313?rel=author
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/Jason.M.Matthews
Twitter - http://twitter.com/Jason_Matthews
LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jason-matthews/7/122/435
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