How to Create a Successful Web Site For Almost Nothing, Pt. 3
Thanks to competition among Web-hosting providers, and the falling costs of Web storage, it’s never been easier to get a Web site up and running — from buying the domain name to building a site to setting up a payment system to tracking traffic.
This week in a 5-part series, we’ll lay out all the steps you need to take to build your site, and present some expert opinion about getting it noticed and keeping track of customers — all with no technical background required. So far, we have bought our web address and found a web host., today we build the web site.
The good news: Most of the free hosting services provide tools that let you build a site quickly, without lots of technical know-how.
Among the things you’ll need: a welcoming home page; an “About” page that describes you and your business; and a “Contact” page that tells people where you’re located and how to reach you. The rest depends on your business. If you own a restaurant, you might include a “Menu” page. If you’re selling a product, you might include a “Store” page where people can buy your wares.
Adding those things can be simple. In Weebly, for instance, click on the “Pages” tab, then choose “New Page.” In Office Live, click “Web pages” in the top left-hand corner of the editor and choose “New page.” In SynthaSite, click “New Page” at the top of the editor.
In each case, doing so calls up a blank page template, like opening a new document in Microsoft Word. Once you’ve created a page, you usually can add content simply by typing the text you want into the template and dragging and dropping graphics.
There are some downsides to these free hosting services. Each offers several dozen design templates, but you could still end up with a site that looks pretty generic, unless you have Web-design skills or hire someone who does. What’s more, most of these services don’t offer an easy, one-click way to add flourishes such as shopping carts or more than two columns on a page; that, too, takes some know-how. Mostly, you just arrange pictures, text and other elements, and that’s it. And, sometimes, even doing that can be tricky for nontechies.
There’s one more free and easy way to improve the design of your site — using HTML programming code. Fortunately, you don’t need to have programming skills to use HTML. All you need to know is that a block of HTML — essentially, a bunch of gobbledygook words and symbols — can add extra features to your site. And numerous third-party sites offer handy HTML blocks you can plug into your site, as easily as copying and pasting text in Microsoft Word.
Ali Shapiro, a health counselor in Philadelphia, recently found one such program — an appointments calendar — at Scheduly Ltd.’s site. She copied a snippet of HTML from Scheduly and pasted it into the “Contact” page at her own site, PyourNutrition.com5. The result: Visitors to Ms. Shapiro’s site can see a calendar with her free time slots and sign up for appointments over the Web.
Photo by lusi/CraigPJ.
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