How to Build a Website for Free

Video Transcript

"Hi, Michael Burton, with michaelburtonfilms.org, located in Salt Lake City, Utah. We're here talking about internet essentials. Now, I want to show you how to build a website for free. There's a couple of ways you can do this, so let me show you. There are many different ways to build a website for free, or almost free. I know that where I have my websites, through Yahoo, they offer a free program called Yahoo Site Builder, which I can download, and then build a website. It's an HTML site, very simple, very cheap obviously, free. You don't need to have much knowledge in HTML, in order to do it, so it's basically for anybody, even beginners. There are other programs that you can purchase. The one I have is Art Explosion Publisher Pro, and that one allows me, not only to create flyers and pamphlets, and business cards and things, but it also has an option for website design, so I can design a website. Another way of getting free or at least semi-free websites, is if you go to, if we type it up here, templatemonster.com. By going to templatemonster.com, what this does, is it brings up a number of templates, for websites, such as HTML Flash, and even has SwishMax, which is another program, similar to Flash, that you can purchase, that's real easy, that I have used, and it is very simple. I've also used Flash, and so I've seen the difference, and it would be another way for you to go, but in here, right here under your left, you can search for products, and you can search under certain categories. For example, if we were to search under the category right here, here's all our categories. If we were to search under Art & Photography, we check mark that, and then we come up here, and we click Apply, and now we click Search. What this will do, is it will give us any template under the Art and Photography category. Now, these templates do cost money, but they are usually very, very cheap. I've seen them for anywhere from sixty five, to a hundred dollars, and usually, not much more than that. Like for example, if we were to highlight one of these. Let's highlight this one. This one right here, is going for $75, or you can pay the $3200, to get this website template, specifically for your business, and they'll take it off of this list, and no one else will be able to use it, so they're basically selling this design, for $3200, or you can buy it for $75, but there may be thirty or forty or fifty, or a hundred more people out there, with the exact same website. Of course, once you download the template, as long as you have Macromedia Flash, or something else, such as Dreamweaver, or Photoshop or something, you can change this website around, and design it, customize it to your own liking, so that's another option to go. It's not free, you do have to pay for the template, but then once you get the template, you can go ahead and do what you want with that. Now, most places where you sign up, like through Yahoo, or something. Let's go back to Yahoo. Now, if you go through Yahoo, for web hosting, come down here on the left hand side. It says Small Business, Get a Web Site, and Domain Names. If you want to go to Domain Names, and you want to search for a specific domain, to see if it's available, you're not going to get it for free. You have to pay a yearly fee, which varies from company to company. Yahoo currently charges $9.95 a year, for their domain names, which is actually a really good price. That's why I go through them. Another option for building a website for free, that I've found, is actually to use blogspot. If you go to www.blogspot.com, this day and age, everyone is switching to blogging. Blogging seems to be a very popular trend nowadays, and it's because it's free, and it's like having your own small website, so if you go here, and you want to come down here to where it says, Create your blog now. Go in there, it's three steps, very simple. You can get your blog up and running, within ten minutes, and start uploading photos, and text, and video, and doing advertising from your blogspot. We have our website, which is michaelburtonfilms.org, and we also have a blogspot, michaelburtonproductions.blogspot. com, and we use them both simultaneously. Actually, we have found that, by uploading videos to the blogspot, it's a lot quicker than uploading videos that we want to show off, to our website, because of the steps you have to go through with Flash, in order to change your video files into FLV or SWF files, and then get them uploaded. It's much quicker and easier to do it using a blog, so we use that pretty much as our new website, because, blogspot. Now, there are other blogs out there. You don't need to go to blogger.com. There are other websites and other companies, that sell blogs, and actually there are ones that you can actually create even more interesting looking blogs. These at blogger.com, are very simple. You can choose from some templates, and then you can customize it, the way you want to make it look, and it's all free."