If you've never created a website of your own because it seems daunting, or expensive, fret no more. There are a number of services that make it dumb-down easy to build a Web presence and even host it free.
We recently tried freewebs.com and had a site up and running in an hour or two. It's nothing fancy, but it's professional-looking and serves the purpose as an online meeting place for our neighborhood. More important, it's so easy that others can make changes. That's a relief to my wife, who put it together but didn't want to forever maintain it. "Anybody can do it," she says.
Freewebs will host a site with minimum traffic for no charge—storing up to 40 megabytes and 500 MB of bandwidth, meaning that's how much can be downloaded in a month. That isn't much, but we suspect it may be enough for our 'hood's news. And it might be enough for sharing a site with far-flung family, which is another goal.
Freewebs pays its bills by putting ads on your free site. For a mere $15 a year, the ads go away, and the limits bump to 100 MB of storage and 1 gigabyte of bandwidth. Or paying $50 a year more than triples those.
At that price, there are other hosting services that will give you more space. But I can't imagine any of them being easier to use. Having to use the site's templates can constrain creativity. But simple is good.
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berries of 7:38PM May 06, 2010