Creating a Free Website

Hi All,

Good morning. I’m back with you today to talk about the process of getting a website online for your window cleaning business.

We started this series of articles by first discussing domain names: how/where to buy it, how to save money (use a coupon code) when buying it, etc. That blog post is here if you haven’t read that yet.

Next we talked about editing the DNS information at your registrar (the place where you purchased your domain name from).

Today we’ll talk about the actual website itself as far as creating one. There are a number of ways to create websites all the way from free methods to paying for expensive web designers.

In this blog post, I”ll talk about one free method to building a website.

To back up for a second, when you secure webhosting for your website, you may ask yourself “now what do I do?”. I get this quite a bit actually when folks sign up to 5.88webhosting.com. They’ll get their login information via email after they signup, but they really don’t know what the next step is, so they’ll send me an email asking me for assistance on how to proceed.

Of course the purpose of webhosting is to host your website for the world to see, so now let’s talk about one method of creating that all important website.

If you are going to create a website yourself, you do need an html editor. Although most html editors cost money, there is a free html editor that you can download called Kompozer.

If you can work in Microsoft Word or any other word processing program, then you can use Kompozer. It’s a WYSIWYG html editor which means “what you see is what you get”. So if you bold or underline text for example, then it’ll appear as bold or underlined on the webpage after it’s online. Again, this is very similar to when you create a document in a word processor. You don’t need to fool with html code or none of that in a WYSIWYG html editor.

Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like:

One thing that you need to understand is that if you simply start typing text into Kompozer, save it, and upload it to your hosting company, it’ll look terrible. You need some graphics or a nice design to grab your visitor’s attention.

So yes, although Kompozer is free to download and use, I would highly recommend that you have a graphic designer create what is called a “template”.  You can see a screenshot below of Kompozer after I have opened a template in it.

See the difference? The text that you see in the template above is just placeholder text, but that’s where you would write your website text. Isn’t this much more attractive rather than just plain ‘ole text on a white background? The person who I’ve used over the years to create my websites and various templates is barb wilson. You can contact her at barbara@ecoverdesigns.com.

To save some  money, you can ask her to create just a template for you with your company name in the header:

The alternative is to have her do the entire site for you. And she does do this too. She has some really attractive designs she created that are focused around window cleaning businesses. But if you want to save some money, then just having her create a one page template that you can work on in Kompozer is a good option.

So all you have to do is open up the template in Kompozer, create (write the text into) the various web pages, and do a “save as” (go to “file” and scroll down to “save as”) to save each page. So for example, in addition to the main/home page, you might want a webpage that talks about your services. This page you might want to name “services.htm”. Or maybe you want a webpage that displays some general pricing information for your services, so that particular webpage might be named “pricing.htm”. Etc. Etc.

In the screenshot below, you’ll see that my template consists of 7 webpages. You’ll see 7 navigation buttons. After the website is online, when visitors click on these navigation buttons, they’ll get directed to their desired page. They are: “Home”, “About”, “Service”, “Pricing”, “Testimonials”, “Contact”, “Internet Specials”. As a side note though, you certainly don’t need all these pages. I mean if I wanted to, I could simply post my contact information like email address and phone on each webpage which means then that I wouldn’t need a separate “Contact” webpage.

Another note I’d like to make above. See how I have the various webpages opened in Kompozer? The tab that is highlighted happens to be the “about.htm” webpage. I did a “save as” as described earlier and saved all 7 pages, so now with each page open in Kompozer, it’s a simple matter of selecting the page and writing the appropriate text in it. So for example, in the “testimonials.htm” page, I would insert some testimonials.

I think I’ll end here for today. In the next couple of days, I’ll post an alternative method of creating a website for free plus of course we need to know how to get the website from your computer to your hosting company. So stay tuned.

Have a great day.

Steve

P.S. Keep in mind that I can’t provide support for the Kompozer software itself. I can only provide support for the products and services that I provide. If you need assistance, Kompozer has a “Help” tab at the top right of the program when you have it opened up. Oh…and the download link again to download Kompozer is here.