Ways to make a simple website

If you want a really quick and simple site, without many ‘bells and whistles’, here are a couple of free services that might help you get up and running. With both of the options, all the information/pages is stored on the server (an online computer), and you add/edit/delete the information in your web browser. This also saves you the hassle (and cost) of having hosting.

So, what are the options:

1 Google Sites

If you’re looking for a simple site, with a couple of pages, then Google Sites might just fit the bill. http://www.google.com/sites/overview.html

It’s free and is very easy to use for creating a simple page(s). In five minutes, I made: http://sites.google.com/site/simplewebhelp/

You can choose from many different templates (that are all simple and quite nice).

You get a web address like: http://sites.google.com/site/yoursitename/

If you’d like to use a domain name (like http://www.yoursitename.com, which you have to get separately), you can do so by either changing a couple of settings on the domain or by signing up for ‘Google apps for your domain’ (https://www.google.com/a/), which is also free. This gives you access to some of the great Google tools (Gmail, Google Calendar, etc. and Google sites is built into it) but all from your own domain name. Google apps can take a little bit of time to set-up, but Simple Web Help could help you with that! (see the end of the tutorial)

2 Wordpress.com

If you’d like a slightly bigger site with more pages, and a full dated/archived news/blog section, then www.wordpress.com is a very good service. (I use the full wordpress program, which is bigger and more powerful and which you download and install on your own server, for many of my big sites – including the Simple Web Tutorials and News.)

With www.wordpress.com you get a free site and the address would be like: http://simplewebhelp.wordpress.com/

It’s got lots of features and is very easy to use. It’s not as full featured and flexible as the ‘download and install’ version, but for medium sites it’s a good option. http://wordpress.com/features/

You can choose from a range of templates/themes: http://wordpress.com/features/theme-examples/

You can also use your own domain name on a wordpress.com site. Adding a domain costs $10 a year (if you already own the domain – or you can register it through wordpress.com for $15 a year). But having email addresses from your own domain (such as info@yoursitename.com) can quite tricky with wordpress.com sites.

Conclusion

If you want a simple, basic page/site, I’d recommend Google Sites; but if you’d like/want more features, wordpress.com might be better. Domain names cost about $10 a year.

Simple Web Help can help you set-up a site on either Google Sites or wordpress.com and also help you register a get the domain.

If you’d like Simple Web Help to help you with this, then Get Help Now!

Download a pdf version of the tutorial (75kb)

On: 13th Mar 09 In: Tutorials

Church Web 123
Tech Support & Web Help for your church site