Most of you are here to find out how to get a free website. We’ve prepared a basic guide to share some tips for anyone who is a complete novice to hosting and web design.

Here’s a Step-by-step guide of how to create a free website:

1. Planning for your Site: Understand what you want to achieve and have a plan for your new website.
2. Understand the Basics of Websites: Hosting, Free Web Hosting, Website Builders and Domain Names.
3. Find a Free Hosting & Website Company: Identify the best service provider offering free websites and free web hosting. All of them will provide you with a free website builder to create your site and a free web address for your website.
4. Sign-Up for an Account: Sign Up with your preferred free website provider by completing their application form.
5. Complete your Account Registration: Check your email for the Registration Confirmation Email and click on the link to confirm your account.
6. Start Creating Your Site: Start to design your site using the Site Builder offered by your provider.
7. Confirm Your Site’s Address: Decide on whether to use the free web address (eg. http://YourSite.free-websites.com) OR purchase a unique domain name for your site (eg. http://www.YourSite.com.
8. Unique Domain Name: If you decide on the unique domain (recommended), register your chosen domain at a domain registrar offering cheap domain name registration and follow the instructions to forward the domain to your site at the free website provider.

It’s really quite easy.

If you have any questions, please post them in the comments section below.

Further Reading: 10 Website Design Planning Tips for Beginners

After a promising start, AEIOU.com closed down from offering website design and development services to domain name owners and other customers looking for mini-sites.

In a post from his blog, AEIOU founder Rick Latona says that “There’s No Money in Web Design. AEIOU is getting out of the outsourcing business“:

We were the first company to sell mini-sites so we might as well be the first company to stop selling them.

The reality is there is no money in web design. It’s hard. The customers are hard to please. The margins are slim and frankly, there are bigger fish to fry.

Others would disagree with this statement, as they continue to provide web design services profitably.

Looking deeper into the post, it appears that in comparison to his company’s booming auction and brokerage businesses, there’s not much point in providing low budget mini web site development.

Fair enough.

The domain name industry is buzzing with the phrase ‘domain development‘ as frantic domain name owners rush to develop their premium domains into useful websites.

Domain Parking

In the domain name aftermarket, professional domain name investors would buy top grade domain names, predominantly in the dot com (.com) extention and place a simple one page website on the domain which is full of related advertisting links.

When a user comes to the domain name, they will see the single page of ads and once they click on one of the paid advertisements, the domain owner will receive advertising revenue. This process is known as domain parking.

Parking Limitations

Although domain parking is a cheap and easy way to monetize a domain name which generates traffic, there are an inceasing number of reasons why domain owners are scrambling to develop their domain names into websites as an alternative to parking.

• Internet Advertisers can now opt out of having their ads shown on domain parking pages
• Domain parking advertising rates are falling due to advertiser opt-outs and a general slowdown in internet ad rates
• Domain parking traffic is decreasing as search engines and internet browsers introduce features that lower direct navigation traffic
• Domain parking does not generate additional search traffic from getting more pages indexed in the search engines

The Need for Domain Development

With these developments, professional domain name owners (also known as domainers) are exploring the range of products and services available for web development.

There are many services offering custom website design and packaged mini sites which cost a couple of hundred dollars, but a large majority of domainers will be searching for solutions to build free websites on their domains.

Although custom development may have a lot of advantages, for domainers who own thousands of domains, it may not be financially feasible if you consider that to develop 1,000 domains at a cost of US$200, would require an investment of US$200,000 to build sites on all 1,000 domains.

Free Websites

The choices for using free online services and publishing platforms to build websites has improved a lot over the last few years.

Before paying for custom developed sites, domainers with a large domain portfolio may want to consider the available solutions for free websites.

It’s amazing how often people end up choosing a service provider because of some free promotion such as ‘free domain names’. Eagerness to grab this freebie may lead to a lot of other problems down the road, so be careful before jumping on free domain promotions.

Free Domain Name Offers

The majority of the companies who offer free domain names are normally web hosting companies who bundle a free domain name together with their paid web hosting solutions. While this is a reasonable package, it’s worth noting that it’s always best to manage your own domain names with a reputable registrar.

Domain names are one of the most important assets in your website and you must be in control of it. Many people have spent lots of time and money to build their site and gain search engine rankings, only to have it disappear because they forgot to renew their domain.

It is the renewal cost of the domain that you want to watch out for when taking a more detailed look at the free domain name offers. As you can see in Microsoft’s free domain names promo, the renewal cost after the first year is US$5 higher than most other domain registrars. Five bucks may not sound like much but if you consider that the renewal price is about $10, an extra $5 is huge in percentage terms.

Heavily Discounted Domains

Similar to free domain names, are promotions which push heavily discounted domains and once again, there’s a catch. In most cases, the really cheap domain registration is attached with a condition that the name must be purchased and renewed for at least a year where the cost of domain name renewal in the second year is much higher than industry standards.

If you simply can’t resist these free deals, one simple tip is to go with reputable domain name registrars when choosing free domain offers. This is because they will have the complete infrastructure for you to host, manage and transfer your domains if you are a domain name trader.

When Yahoo offered very cheap domain name registration rates last year, many domainers rushed to register domains there only to find out later that it was a nightmare trying to transfer the domain away from Yahoo to another registrar. Some domain sellers even found it easier to give their whole Yahoo account to the buyer!

Domain Name Discount Codes & Coupons

Instead of relying on the freebies, one good way to save money when registering domain names is to use the available discount codes and coupons from domain registrars.

You can often find savings of up to 35% or more by using discount coupons to buy domains from Godaddy and a range of other specialist domain name companies.

Find out more about the importance of domain names.