You can start a website in one of several ways. In the beginning, if you wanted to develop a website to call your own, there were just two ways – you could either take the scenic route and go it like the big boys did, or you could sign up with a free website company like Yahoo GeoCities and get a website-within-a-website. You pretty much didn’t have to do any work or pay anything with GeoCities. If your name was Jane Q. Public, you just had to sign up and you would get assigned a website that was called something like “www.janeqpublic.geocities.com”.
A lot of people were happy at first just to see their name in print on the screen; after a while though, they began to fret about how they had to tolerate the name GeoCities after their own name. It didn’t really feel like their own website. But what could Yahoo do? They were giving these away for free; they needed some way of collecting advertising revenue for their costs. If they just gave people their own website without the GeoCities name tagged on, how would they ever get paid? What was worse, they would have to pay for your costs, giving you your own independent website elsewhere.
Actually, while the Yahoo GeoCities experiment is quite over today (Yahoo shuttered the website a couple of years ago), the concept is alive and well. You can still get a website (sort of) piggybacking on another website. They call that a hosted blog these days. If you want one of these, you just go to websites like Google Blogger or WordPress.com (not WordPress.org, which is a slightly different thing). These places allow you to open a website within their website – it works nearly the same way GeoCities used to. You don’t have to put up with being forced into their mold either; on WordPress for instance, you get a nearly infinite variety of beautifully-designed themes for free that allow you to get exactly the look for your website that you want.
Free places like WordPress can be great for the absolute beginner who just wants to start out without being bothered about the details. If you’re a real beginner, you probably don’t even know what details there are that you don’t want to bother with. Here’s a short description below.
If you went with your own proper website, you would have to pay between $5 and $20 every year to put dibs on the name of your website (that in tech speak they call a domain name or a URL), you would have to go to a hosting service at about $25 a year that would hold your website on their computer every minute of every day and allow access to your website to anyone who came looking for it, you would have to find a way to design the website and take care of the technical details to do with putting your photos and writing on there, and you would have to come up with a system for organizing all that stuff (in tech speak, they call this a content management system or a CMS). If you go with a free website on WordPress though on the other hand, they just take care of the whole thing for you.
That sounds like a great deal if they do all this for you for free. Well, if your needs are fairly limited – if what you want is just a presence on the web to put your photos on and so on, this would be an excellent solution. You do give up the freedom to have a website that only has your name there (and not the name of another website that’s doing all the heavy lifting for you, attached to your name). You also give up the ability to really, really make your website exactly as you dream of it. There is also the matter of the kind of design your website gets to have and the kind of content you’re allowed to put on there. But then, you do get to get on the web without really learning how to develop a website. And that’s a great convenience.
So what should you do? Is the alternative – learning how to develop a website and paying to put it out there, really as bad as it sounds? As far as we on this website are concerned, a free hosted website really isn’t the kind of opportunity for individual expression that the dream of your own website has always meant. And additionally, should your website really take off and become popular one day, you could actually earn something for it through advertising. You wouldn’t really be able to do that if you were a free website on someone else’s website.
The price of having your own real individual independent website isn’t what it used to be. It shouldn’t cost you no more than $35 for a whole year of putting your website out. And if you’re worried about all the elbow grease that goes into maintaining a website and keeping it together, there are solutions out there that are available for free. You should probably take a quick look at the straight-forward guide we have here on how to develop a website from scratch. As you see, it’s really no trouble at all once you get a hang of it. Just think about it – you have a chance to have website out there with your name on it. Do you really want to attach someone else’s name to it?