How to design a website for free?

With many excellent free blog sites, providing customisable layouts, creating your own website for free has never been easier.

Basic elements

Many free blog sites around these days provide easy tutorials for website building. Two of the biggest hosting web sites are Tumblr.com and Blogspot.com, though these are by no means the only places to design your own web page without having to pay. For those with little or no experience of web design, these blogs offer design themes for your website to ensure you maintain a strong colour and branding theme throughout. Simple menus and tutorials teach you how to set up your own website upon the blog and customise it with added features such as the ability to link to twitter accounts, upload images and video to media libraries and having a static homepage rather than being forced to have a 'posts' page as your initial page. You can add pages to your site very simply and can post content purely via a 'visual' editor which shows you how your content will look upon the website or, for the more experienced, you can do this in the HTML editor. With so many web tutorials available for free to teach you HTML and CMS coding, it is easy to add some particularly flashy design elements to your website.

Purchasable extras

Although the basic set-up of free blogs is great, in regards to helping you design your own website, there are of course added features which can be purchased in order to enhance your website. One of the main features is that you can buy a web address, still to be hosted by the blog site, but it enables you to have a simpler URL which does not have to include the name of the blog. Other features you can buy include: removing ads from your blog (which may be desirable if you are using the site to create your own business), increasing your storage capacity on your website to enable you to have a larger media library and the ability to customise your themes and design (although CSS knowledge is required for this). With technological advances, there is now very little that you cannot do upon these free blogs to create an impressive looking site. The best thing to do is try them all and see which system you gel best with, in terms of managing your website and content. It is also worth browsing online forums for threads regarding how people have customised their blogs to work best for their needs. Remember tutorials are also available upon the sites and upon forums too.