Building a Great Website Practically Free

Not long ago, building your own website was expensive and difficult to manage. You typically needed to pay professionals to build and manage a custom site. Even if you had some programming skills, it was a pain to change or update your site. But even then, it was still worth it. After all, you needed a public face for your business to advertise your services and properties.

Thankfully, today is different. There are some great options that allow you to build a website without any technical knowledge. The Best Part: They are practically free.

I'm going to describe the two best options in the market today, the one you choose is based on how much control you want over your site. I call them Option A: "Fully Customizable" and Option B: "Cheap and Easy."

Option A: The Fully Customizable Site

The backbone Option A is WordPress (http://wordpress.org/). WordPress was originally a blogging company that has now grown to support all types of websites imaginable. There is a large community of contributors to WordPress that continue to build different layouts, themes, plug-ins, etc. so you can make your website exactly how you want it. For example, it's really easy to include a blog, metrics, custom forms, surveys, comments, interactive features, even accept payments through PayPal -- really pretty much anything on your website. You can also customize the colors, layouts, menus to your liking. The best part is that WordPress is 100% free although you can choose to pay for some premium upgrades. This is a good example of a WordPress Real Estate site: http://www.realestatebradentonfl.com/category/bradenton-real-estate

How-To: First, you should register your domain and find a hosting company. I recommend that you use the same company to do both (GoDaddy.com and Bluehost.com are both good options, but there are plenty of others out there). This is the only cost you have and the cheapest options cost you $50-60 per year. Then, you will need to install your WordPress files where your hosted site is (instructions vary by hosting company so I won't include them there). From there, you can go to your site and customize it. There is a learning curve, but it is so much easier than doing any actual programming.

Option B: Cheap and Easy

As you might have guessed from the name of my blog, my own website (www.mindspringrealty.com) uses Option B. You pay to register your site (about $20 per year) and that is your only cost! Everything else is thanks to our friends at Google. They have launched a new service called Google sites, which I predict will be huge in the next two years. The hosting and customization is all free. You can also link your site into Google Docs which allows you to collect data in forms. One thing to note though is that Google Sites does not have features to turn on additional security (i.e. https or SSL), so I would not recommend collecting Social Security numbers or payments using this option (yet!).

 

How-To: First, register your domain anywhere (e.g. GoDaddy.com). Then go to sites.google.com and create a site. It's actually pretty self-explanatory and by far the easiest interface I've ever encountered. Then you have to link your domain name with your Google Sites address (which requires changing a CNAME -- it's not too hard, but contact your domain registry company if you have issues).

So there you have it -- you can have your own, customized website on a shoestring budget!


(Note: These things still take some work and computer savvy. Email me if you're interested in paying someone to set up your site. I can give you some references that will do this for about $500.)