If you've never created a website of your own because it seems daunting, or expensive, fret no more. There are a number of services that make it dumb-down easy to build a Web presence and even host it free.
We recently tried freewebs.com and had a site up and running in an hour or two. It's nothing fancy, but it's professional-looking and serves the purpose as an online meeting place for our neighborhood. More important, it's so easy that others can make changes. That's a relief to my wife, who put it together but didn't want to forever maintain it. "Anybody can do it," she says.
Freewebs will host a site with minimum traffic for no charge—storing up to 40 megabytes and 500 MB of bandwidth, meaning that's how much can be downloaded in a month. That isn't much, but we suspect it may be enough for our 'hood's news. And it might be enough for sharing a site with far-flung family, which is another goal.
Freewebs pays its bills by putting ads on your free site. For a mere $15 a year, the ads go away, and the limits bump to 100 MB of storage and 1 gigabyte of bandwidth. Or paying $50 a year more than triples those.
At that price, there are other hosting services that will give you more space. But I can't imagine any of them being easier to use. Having to use the site's templates can constrain creativity. But simple is good.
Start the discussion! Be the first to comment on this story.