How to conquer the website building mountain - for free

Firstly, how long have you been struggling with the Internet for before you found this page? If you’ve been sitting staring at a screen for any longer than thirty minutes I want you to stand up (if you are able) and walk five times round the room while shaking some life back into your arms and body. Please. Here, I’ll do it with you, come on. Get up already!

Okay, now we’re back to sitting comfortably, I want to ask you - What do you need a website for?

Is your business something that will flourish once it appears on Google searches, or is it more that word-of-mouth will work better for you and you need a site to refer people to on business cards and adverts? If you don’t know, don’t worry right now about it, I’m just wanting you to realise that maybe at this stage you don’t need to be spending your hard earned cash on an all singing, all dancing website, there is another way to build a website for free, until you are ready or require something bigger.

Basic Websites

A basic website is somewhere to put an about you page - who you are and what services you offer, starting prices, a contact form and some customer reviews, so that you have a presence online. Like a business card on the Internet.

It is useful to have a website, but it may not be an essential marketing tool for your business, which is why I don’t want you going out and investing £500 to build a website when you are starting out.

If all you want to host your name and business details online, please do not spend a fortune finding someone to design a website for you. You can hire them later if you want to have an all singing all dancing website. Right now, all you actually need is a fairly basic site, you can do yourself using the below instructions, or I can build a basic website for you, for £30.00, all you’re paying for there is my time. Or find someone else, like a friend with website building knowledge, who can do this for you, for free.

I’m not trying to sell my wares here, I’m trying to help small businesses, start-ups and individuals who just want to have an online presence. I’ve been there. It’s hard enough trying to learn all the new terminology that comes with starting your own business and find yourself up against another brick wall of learning how websites work as well.

Using Weebly to Build Your Website

There are free website building websites out there, that use template designs. These include Wordpress, Wix, Ghost, and Weebly. If you use their free service they will leave some of their own branding on your site, take a look at my website www.rulewater.co.uk as this was built using Weebly’s free service. I’ve added my own adverts to the site to try to get it to pay for its own upkeep too.

Everyone has their own preferences about which website builder to use. I know Weebly, I understand it, so I stick with it, having tried Wordpress and finding it just a bit too complicated. So, here I can offer you a step-by-step guide as to how to get started with Weebly’s free website design service. If you want to learn how to use another free website building tool, please return to Google.

Starting Your Weebly Website

Weebly’s website builder is a click-and-drag site, no coding required!

First - you will need to register with them, standard information like a username and password personal to you.

Start your site by Choosing a template, the most popular ones appear on the screen.  These offer different layouts for where your heading, menu, text and images will appear on the page.  Choose one you like.  Don't dwell too much on this, you can always change it later.

Choose your website domain name. You can make one up for now, try and keep it professional though i.e. gemmalubbock.weebly.com Let me explain a bit about the Domain Name: You can buy a domain, which is a more professional looking name, which is more memorable for people interested in your services, ie gemmalubbock.com. And I’d recommend you do this.  

But, don’t buy your domain from the website design page, go and take a look on Google and you will see services like GoDaddy, 123-Reg.com offering names at a really cheap rate. You shouldn’t pay over £12 a year for your Domain Name.

Now, if you own your own domain name, the next thing you think you want to do is click the third box, which is link up the Weebly site to your domain name?  Don’t do this, they will want you to pay to link them up.  And there is another way.  At least I’ve found one with GoDaddy.  From GoDaddy, you can ask them to “Point” your Domain Name (costing £12 a year) to your Free Weebly website. Which links the website to your Domain Name at no extra cost. So, so far, all its costing you to have your personal website is £12 a year.  And that’s still all its costing me for rulewater.co.uk.

Keep going with building your template at your weebly.com domain name and once you’re ready you can Point your professional Domain Name later.

So, you’ve chosen a template that you like, and one that suits your brand or business, and clicked Continue?  Weebly will tell you its building your website and navigate to the website building page.

From here, you will use the black squares on the left to build your page on the right.  The main ones you will use are Text boxes and Image boxes. But you don’t even have to worry about them!

Look at the page on your right. It will have text already on it.  All you have to do is click onto the text, delete the words and replace them with your own. Click on the image on the page to replace it with your own images. You can choose from Weebly’s free image gallery, or Upload from your Computer.

If you don’t need all their text boxes or their images, then there’s an X in the top right corner when the blue box appears, which will delete them. If you need extra image boxes, that's when you go over to the black squares and drag an image box to where you want it on the page.

And that’s the basics right there! I’d recommend you have a Home Page, introducing yourself, a more detailed Services page, breaking things down into costs, an About Me page and a Contact Me page, which you can tell to send any queries to your chosen email address.  

There are more options on there, which if you’re feeling confident you can explore at your leisure, but right now for this article I’m just wanting to tell you how to get yourself a website online and not over complicate things for you.

Once you are satisfied with your entire website design, click publish and it will be live on the Internet.

Then it is time for going back to your Domain Provider and pointing the domain name to the free site.

You may want to submit your website to Google, through Google, so that it is picked up in Searches. That’s free too. Don't think you have to pay random people who email you a fortune to get your site in top ten searches in Google, they are scammers.

Hope that is of some help to you. If it’s still a bit daunting, as I said, get in touch (there's a contact form in the top right navigation menu on this blog) and I’ll build one for you for £30, for my time. If you do it yourself, Good Luck, Congratulations, and Well Done, you've just achieved a massive goal on your way to your small business success!