how can i make my own website for free?

[millymcb]

This one looks interesting.. it is called Yola and is a similar principle to Wix

http://www.appappeal.com/app/yola/
http://www.imreportcard.com/services/yola

Some Free hosting.  Expensive to buy a personal domain name from them but you can get a free one that is yourname.yola.com which is fine - or buy cheap one elsewhere and still use it (i think). Supposed to be easy to use.

I am going to investigate further and may give it a try

Milly

[KGarrad]

I used Weebly - www.weebly.com - to design my website.

It's free until you want advanced facilities!!

I also have a contact page there.
www.croquet.eu.com, for those interested!

[nickgc]

If you are planning on designing your own website I do hope that you have a good grounding in HTML, stylesheets, etc.  And even a better one in design.  The reason I say this is that there are some incredibly badly designed family history websites out there done by people without a lick of design sense.

Tribal Pages gives you a basic template that is quite clean and lets you change some minor attributes.  But it is also possible to use HTML to modify it.  From what I have seen from people who have delved deeply into these modifications, is that they seldom have any sense of what works and create websites that make my eyeballs bleed.

Nick

[Gen List Lass]

Google Sites is good and free, I used it with no prior experience whatsoever.....

I bought my domain first of course ..........


Gen in NBL England

[Uncle Reff]

If you are planning on designing your own website I do hope that you have a good grounding in HTML, stylesheets, etc.  And even a better one in design.  The reason I say this is that there are some incredibly badly designed family history websites out there done by people without a lick of design sense.

I completely agree with that Nick...

The biggest problem that I had with my website was not so much the data input, nor the technicalities, but how to make it look good. After all no one is going to spend time on a badly designed site, thereby negating all the effort expended on it.

BTW I should say that Dreamweaver is not old hat or out dated, it is the industrial standard... 

John

[mike175]

I also agree with Nick, there are some really awful websites around, but basic HTML is easy to learn. Of course a lot depends on the type of site you want. Something like a family tree site works best if you concentrate on the content and don't try to be too clever with fancy effects. Start with simple text-based pages before experimenting with different fonts, colours, page layout, etc.

TribalPages is a good basic template but if you want to experiment with your own layouts everything you need to know is here: http://www.w3schools.com/

And when you want to dress it up a bit there are some fascinating examples here: http://www.csszengarden.com/

But beware! Web design can easily become an obsession, distracting you from the genealogy

Mike.

[cati]

I think a good rule of thumb is to explore a few websites, make a note of what you don't like, then avoid those features like the plague...

Personally I dislike fancy fonts and/or pale text on dark backgrounds, because I find them very difficult to read.

If you have links to other websites then check periodically that the link still works!

And the 'music' option on Tribalpages (which otherwise I find an excellent site) is particularly grim.

Cati
 

[[Ray]]

Hi

If you intend going down the more technical route and plump for html, go straight for HTML5.
It will save you time longer term and you may find a book in the library.
If you intend going even more technical (ASP,PHP,SQL,VB,C#++) then you probably don't need advice from here.

Google/Microsoft/others plus the major Hosting companies all have variant webpage creators.
Keep looking until you spot one that you think you'd like.

No such thing as free. ....

Ray

[julianb]

I used Net Objects Fusion as a WYSIWYG editor to make my site - I got it off a Pc magazine cover disc.   As they have just launched a new version, the previous version might soon feature on mag discs. 

I use 110mb as a (free) host - http://www.110mb.com/

You might find the webspace board on here helpful http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php/board,292.0.html.  There's examples of rootschatters fh websites listed there - just follow the link in my footer (below)

Good luck

JULIAN