Tips on how to make your own free website for personal use

There are many good reasons to make your own free website but making money is not one of them. Well even if you are only making a personal web site, wouldn't you be pleased if you got the occasional dollar coming your way? If you want to create a free website for a church or other non-profit organization, wouldn't it be grand if you could make enough money to do away with the endless fundraising raffles?

Free websites are the ones that criminals use to cheat the web visitors. When the police track down the site, they find that it is associated with a hotmail address, and that all other information is false. Is that the sort of neighbourhood you want to be in?

Why not use a free site to make money? Well, without the search engines you'll get only visitors that you tell about your site, and search engines don't like free sites.

Make your own website free

OK. So you want to put up a website to let your friends see your holiday photographs, with a short description of each photo.

Perhaps your scout group wants to raise some money to go to a jamboree? Tough! A free site won't bring you in any money. Do you want to publish articles for scouts around the world to see? You had better have some mechanism in the Scouts to tell everybody about your articles, because you can't promote your site without at least buying a domain name and a host.

Perhaps your church wants to archive the sermons, and create interesting articles about coming events.

Fine that's ideal if you want to make your own website for free. The things that cost money are

Research to find what will bring you visitors

Software to create web pages

Domain name

Web host

You don't need any of these if you don't want to make money. You know what will bring visitors to your pages - you will tell them to come! You can create your own free website using only the software that you already have on your computer.

Oh it might take ten times as long as using better software, but you're just doing it for fun...right?

Who needs a domain name when only friends will see your page?

Your own ISP will probably let you put your non-profit site up as one of the benefits of your account. Ask support for details, including how to upload your files, and what URL to use. If you don't get a free website as part of membership - change your ISP.

How to make a free website using Word

Put your photographs and comments into a Word document. Save as HTML.

Call your first file index.html and put links to the other files

Invent file names for the other files (the same names that the links point to)

To create a link, simply click Insert > Hyperlink, and fill in what you want the link to say and where you want it to jump to.

Tell your friends that if your pages don't work on different browsers than Internet Explorer they should switch to IE to browse your pages. You're all done!

Free Website Builder

Joomla isn't really software that you would want for a simple personal website. It makes it much easier to create your own website, but it's so difficult to learn to use it without good instructions that you wouldn't really want to waste your efforts on it when you make your own free website. However it's really worth learning about if you want to make money.