A few months ago, I promised to help my mom put together a website for her dogs. Well, one of her dogs had puppies last night and she wants to get some pictures and videos online for her list of prospective buyers.
I haven't built a website since high school (about seven years ago) and back then I was just using Geocities in order to practice the html we were learning my computer classes.
What are the best places these days for putting together a free website? Google searches for "free website hosting" or "free website domains" are giving me a ton of services and companies but I can't tell what's legit or really useful.
I wouldn't mind a small banner ad at the top or bottom but would, of course, prefer to be without one. Which have decent templates in case I don't feel like building it from scratch?
Any recommendations or advice would be great. I really just need something quick and easy. But my computer-phobic mother also wants to be able to give her friends a cute, personal web address.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:Well, one of her dogs had puppies last night and she wants to get some pictures and videos online for her list of prospective buyers.
Honestly, unless she intends to use it as a real sales tool, I'd recommend YouTube/Flickr for this purpose.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
Yeah, and she can sign up for a free blog to post them to. That'll let her have a cute domain that looks like (for instance) "reallycutedomainname.blogspot.com".
Posted by Shanna (Member # 7900) on :
I do want to use youtube for videos and she's shown interest in livejournal as a way to journal about their growth.
What I like about a website though is the ability to have a nice, simple layout. To have the puppies names in a sidebar which would then bring up information on that particular dog so that we can post pictures of its markings and such. I'd also want to have pages about the parents be easily available (they're pure-breds and advertising the father is a friendly way of thanking his owner for his "contribution"....ick, btw.)
I just want it to be easy to use without having to flip through back pages on a journal to find entries about a particular puppy they might be interested in.
And once all the puppies are sold, I'd also like to just have something for her to post pictures and links to youtube videos of her own dogs since she keeps them busy with herding and such.
Posted by Vadon (Member # 4561) on :
I think Google Pages may fit your needs. The WYSIWYG editor is actually pretty decent, they have some lovely templates, and you can do a lot of what you're looking for.
You could pick a template with a side-bar and have the links in the side bar be each puppy, and then a little 'status' message under each.
Each Puppy could then have a page devoted to them, she could keep a 'puppy-info' post at the top of each page and then updates could be done in a blog like fashion under each.
I doubt my explanation helps you invision what I'm talking about much, so here's a link to them. http://pages.google.com
Edit:
Oh, it looks like they've canned pages. Well I haven't updated my website in a year, so I can understand why I didn't get the memo. =P
It looks like their new project that's similar is Google Sites.
I think you could still pull off what she's looking for with this.
Posted by Jhai (Member # 5633) on :
I would go with wordpress.com, if I were you, and then just find a free theme that has either a landing page (from which you could redirect to different puppy pages) or has clear categories on the sidebar (where each category would be the particular puppy in question).
Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
I agree with Jhai. I know web designers now who actually create all their websites through wordpress. It makes it easier for them to make the sites, and easier for the client to update the sites.
Posted by Jhai (Member # 5633) on :
Note that wordpress.com is the free site that hosts blogs - any blog you create with it will be yourname.wordpress.com-, while wordpress.org is the blogging software that is freely available, but must be hosted on your own site.
Posted by quidscribis (Member # 5124) on :
I also agree with wordpress.com probably being the best fit. One major reason for that is that Wordpress has pages as well as posts, pages being static pages you can link to from the sidebar rather than having someone flip through blog entry history.
Posted by BlueWizard (Member # 9389) on :
GeoCities was taken over by Yahoo. Yahoo will still host free websites, and they will host cheap, non-commercial websites.
A well know host that advertises in PC World magazine is '1and1'. You can get a pretty good deal on basic hosting services for $3.99 per month, but I suspect that price is if you pay a year in advance.
The lowest price sight includes one personal domain name, plus 25 subdomains, and 600 email accounts.
But, if your friend just want to post pictures, there are plenty of photo sharing sights available. Kodak has one, I think Photobucket is another. I'm sure there are many many more.
As you know, there are also many many web hosting sites. Which ones are reliable, and which ones are going to be there is a few years, is debatable. But there seem to be sites on the net the rate webshosting services, though, they could just as easily be shills for the web hosts.
Steve/bluewizard
Posted by erosomniac (Member # 6834) on :
Wordpress' free sites are probably the best free solution.
Posted by Vadon (Member # 4561) on :
I decided to try out google sites, since I hadn't before and I linked it as a suggestion.
I'm liking it, and it's fairly fun. But two problems I notice pretty quickly are 1. you can't edit the source code directly and 2. it's a pretty cumbersome editor.
That said, I may stick with it. But for your mother's purposes, I think wordpress may be best.