Tech For Free!

Need a website but don’t have access to an experienced web designer, or a budget? While tapping into the expertise of an experience web designer is most desirable, there are some free web design/hosting services that will get you started. Googling “free web design” will provide you with a number of options worth exploring, but I would  like to expedite the search process for you and make a recommendation based upon my own trials of these free services.

I recommend Yola http://www.yola.com. Yola’s free package offers an ad free site, 1GB of storage, a 15MB file upload (think of all those PowerPoints or PDF files you might want to upload), customizable templates, easy drag & drop design, a TON of widgets including google maps, social networking tools, RSS, photo galleries, chat tools, and polling tools (to name only a few). In return, your site displays a tiny Yolo image at the bottom of the screen.

While one may be tempted to instead use a free service like Wix, which offers slick Flash designs complete with animations, I would advise against it. Flash sites, unless intentionally programmed, are not user friendly to individuals using assistive technology, nor do they play on iPhone/iPod touches. Additionally, Flash sites are not search engine friendly. If you want your website found by search engines then you want every piece of text on your page to be read, and Flash based sites do not allow for this, Yola does.

So in short, Yola is the least obtrusive with regard to ads and offers the most features for FREE, and is easy to use. For a fee, Yola can host your custom domain name, and provides an option for purchase.