It's 2008 and everyone from Staples to my friend Luke's cat seems to have a website. But before you start getting .com happy, figure out whether your organization really needs a website because frankly, the only thing worse than no website at all is a website that's built once and never updated (or visited) again.
Chances are that your website will be useful if:
- you need to store group relevant information in one easily accessible place (e.g. forms)
- your group has members that aren't always communicating with you and one another
- you have frequent updates to send to the whole group
- you want to recruit new members
- your group is centered around or really benefits from on going discussions between members.
There are lots of simple and free options available.
Personally, I like to use Weebly.com for free websites, but there are lots of others. This is your best bet if you want your site to be versatile (e.g. blog + info pages + photo gallery) and easily accessible to all on the web.
If you don't need a blog, another fun and free option is making a Wiki space. These are particularly awesome if you want to let everyone collaborate on the content of the website (which I highly recommend).
If all you need is a blog, then check out Wordpress and Blogger.
And if you want the content of your site to be collaborative, versatile, but only accessible to your group members or college, then try making a Google site.
And, of course, you'll need a domain name (i.e. the thing that comes before the .com).
If you really want to keep the experience free, your domain name will most likely be followed by the web tool of your choice (e.g. mysite.wordpress.com). If you really want that mysite.com, you'll have to cough up around $10 per year for it (or go with a .info for as little as $3 per year). You can usually buy a domain from the site you choose or use an independent site like GoDaddy.com (my own fav).
I'll go over some tips on creating the site in my next post, but in the meanwhile, if you have any questions about starting a site using these web tools or have suggestions please let me know at TaniaDudina@gmail.com.
Hey, this is Prem from Blog Profit Mastery. I wrote a similiar post about creating free blog using Wordpress and Blogger and pretty much like the article which you wrote here. It is indeed a really good introductory post which you put up here letting beginners know exactly how to go about set up a blog to whatever it is that they want to do online. Keep it up
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