There are several free websites on the internet that will not only host your small site for free but will also supply you with the tools for actually making the website.  They have templates and the tools needed to do many different website types and are generous enough to share them. Of course many of them are aiming at you growing and increasing the size of the site so that you will in turn end up by paying the hosting fee for the monthly use of their website.
When you start you are given the choice of supplying your own domain name and using that but by using their platform to create your website you are really stuck with them until you are ready to build a completely new site from scratch.
If you use their template you can’t just up and move to another site. All your info is already on their site and although you can remove it you can’t just transfer your site from their hosting to another without totally recreating it.
This is one big drawback of using a free website. Another is that some of them do place adverts on your site. Not all of them mind but some of them. This is their way of monetizing the space they are lending you.

We are going to take a look at a couple of the sites that have this offer available.

This is Sprout inc

Sprout is Advine and Advine is a ad builder for adverts on your site or adverts for Apple and other phones and allows you build add only once and continue to use it. You add assets into the program and then you select the add copy which gets included. It’s a basic drag and drop opportunity with a resulting advert that is interactive with the audience. The result comes out in Html5 as well as flash. In addition to this Sprout is an advertising agent who will build your interactive ads for you for places like Facebook and other social networking sites as well as all manner of services.

Viviti

Viviti is an easy web builder tool on a free or paid hosting site.  The free version offers you 5 mg of storage with 5 pages. This is a total basic with no protection site. This site is paid for by the adverts they place on your pages. If you want anything extra you will need to pay to host 1 site @$10 per month. This gives you unlimited pages and 1 GB of storage as well as password protection and stock photos and no adverts. There are more packages available. You have a 15 day free trial available on all plans.

The last one we are going to look at here is Yola

Here we have a free option which again can be extended into a paid site at the cost of $49.95 a year. The paid version includes a free domain name which will be registered to you. There is also an option to get a Your Name website for $17.95 a year.  Its is a pretty simple website builder with many available templates for you to use as well as the add-ons like tags and checking web traffic.

Well this afternoon it is raining again. I really think the clouds must be gathering for a reason. It’s too early for snow? Or is it? It is already fairly late for this year I suppose. I got to reminiscing this morning about my first camera. I bought it for myself with money I won from my father. He saw me going off down to the beach one day when I was around 5 or 6 and I was carrying a Coca cola bottle and a handkerchief and he enquired what I was going to do.  I told him I was going to catch a fish.  He bet me I couldn’t with that equipment. I patiently worked in the rock pools for hours and triumphantly came home with my fish it the bottle. I had steered it into the bottle with the handkerchief. I bought myself a brownie camera. Cameras have come a long way since then.

Today we are going to look at a few themes that are available for business sites. There are several on the market and each has its merits. It is obviously dependent on both taste and purpose.

The first we are going to look at is Quantum

This theme is packed with goodies. With 16 color ways you really can chose what color you want. Custom logo can be uploaded. You will do well to take a look at it. Ready for WordPress 3 and with all the widgets, shortcodes and custom panels, you will really find it hard to find anything this theme is short of. Added to this they are running a buy 1 get one free promotion.

Business is about Leverage.

Clean cut and well presented with plenty of white space. It like the previous offering from Theme trust comes with all the bells and whistles. Called Leverage, it is Twitter enabled and has all the items necessary for a business site.

Sight

In your sight is the Vision. De vision that is. It is available in three languages and three color ways. This theme is WordPress ready.

Inspiration

When you need inspiration, where better to look than at Inspire? Inspire has a great deal going for it. Loaded with features for showing off your products it was designed by Magnus Jepson of Woo themes. There are 10 different backgrounds to make a choice from or you can set your own color and image. Added to all of this it is SEO ready. In addition you can select your custom management system from three different ones available.

Fullside

This theme comes with admin videos to help you every step of the way. If you are new to this, this really does the trick. The image resizing option is useful and it’s great to see that it is compatible with all the browsers. There is nothing more annoying than finding a website that won’t work on a certain browser.  It’s available in several different colors as part of their standard features. This is available from Chimera.

Well that should give you a few to choose from. Take a look and I will return.

It is no secret that WordPress and other blogging tools have brought a new dimension of usage to the world wide web. Together with social networking, the blog personifies web 2.0 in concept and design. It is not however, just a mere tool for bringing information to the world, but a way of attracting, and promoting your website.

How a blog pushes your website, is a little up to you, but the general idea is that by generating traffic through the content in your blog, will ultimately bring traffic to other parts of your website too. This lovely knock-on effect, means that if you are selling goods or services, you are bringing them to the attention of a wider audience, and this, as we all know, means more sales.

This gives the role of a blog an additional dimension, and one that has been recognised by businesses large and small. Especially as the blog lends itself to search engine optimisation very nicely. Constantly updated content that can be configured to repeat certain keywords, as well as an opportunity to populate it without outbound links.

WordPress widgets are available that make your blog, more suitable for indexing by Google, the daddy of all search engines. As you have no doubt deduced, the traffic that comes your way from your already search engine optimised site, needs to further explanation.

As blogging has become a form of social networking, with discussions across thousands of blogs occurring all the time, it is not unknown that your website could have its name on a hundred others in minutes. This technique, which is also known as link baiting, is also a form of search engine optimisation, and has been adopted by many as a way of driving traffic to their website.

The beauty of the blog is that people will read it if it has something to say. People will be put off if it is a little dull, or just an excuse to display advertisements. It is with this in mind that you must understand that the blog will say a lot about your company or organisation, and so the better it is, the better its reputation will become.

This leads us nicely, to branding. It is a great way to promote your brand image, and a great way to reinforce it. As we have just discussed, make sure you use your blog in the way it was intended, as your brand may be damaged if it is not. The results though, if your blog is used well, could have you popping the champagne corks, for many nights to come.

If you think of your blog, as the best way to sell your ideas, share your thoughts, and promote products with clients, or customers, then you will be well guided to getting people to come to your website. This is the perfect way to increase revenue.

The easiest and best blogging tool is WordPress. Many aspects of it are free, and its customization capabilities are second to none. Even if you plan to a use a more sophisticated blog in the future, WordPress is the one to get you started.

How your blog pushes your website is largely up to you. The fact is that the most cases, the most interesting parts of a website, is its blog. Especially for people that work in the same field, or interesting in purchasing a product from you, and therefore they are potential customers. Therefore, arguably the part of the site to focus most on is the blog. If this is right, the rest will take care of itself.