How to Create a Free Website with Big Features: Webs.com Offers Robust, Feature-Packed Free Sites for All

During the internet boom of the mid-to-late 1990s, it was so exciting for people to build a personal website for free. Back then, Angelfire was a big player in the free website business. Angelfire is still in existence today, but they have narrowed their focus to specifically target the web-savvy teenage demographic.

Numerous other companies offer a free presence on the web. Social networking sites including MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Facebook, and YouTube allow people to customize their free profile and share information with colleagues, friends, and family.

The blog is another venue for a free presence on the net. By setting up a blog with Xanga, WordPress, or Blogger, people can share their opinions on any topic imaginable with the world at large.

Redefining the Website

In recent years, the term "website" has come to mean different things to different people.

Traditionally, a website meant a commercial .com site on the internet with numerous pages, links, pictures, and text. Today, a website may be a blog, social networking profile, or simply personal pictures as we see with the popular photo sharing sites Picasa and Flickr.

One free website creation service has combined many of the features of today's sites into one unique offering: Webs.com.

Overview of Webs.com

Webs.com (formerly known as Freewebs.com) offers a range of features that rivals both Angelfire and Google Sites.

With Webs.com, the member can create a free website for personal use, business, or a group. The group feature is most like Google Sites in the sense that group members can collaborate, share information, post events, and share pictures and video.

Webs.com also offers paid upgrade plans which include custom domain names, an increase in webstore items, ad-free websites, increased bandwidth, and more e-mail accounts. Members can also transfer their existing domain to Webs.com.

Limitations of Webs.com

While Webs.com does not specifically say how much disk space they provide for their free sites, their paid Starter upgrade option cites 5GB bandwidth as compared with 20MB for Angelfire's free website creation service.

On the other hand, neither does Google Sites inform users of bandwidth capacity for their free service. While Google offers 10GB storage capacity for their paid Google Apps Premiere Edition for companies, their free website creation service is, of course, far lower in bandwidth offering.

When signing up for a free website on Webs.com, the member is assigned a domain name of (companyname.webs.com). Unless the member desires to pay Webs.com for a custom domain, this convention is followed through when creating the free website.

Webs.com is supported by placing advertising in members' free websites. To avoid the advertising being placed in the new free site, the member must purchase one of Webs.com's three upgrade options.

Webs.com: The Bottom Line

Bottom line, Webs.com provides people with a robust set of features for building their free website. It's not for the multi million-dollar company, but for the average person it's a great way to establish an online presence. And best of all, it's free.

Mar 19, 2009 11:37 PM

Guest :

My favorite is www.hpage.com

It offers beginners and also advanced users the possibility to create their own websites online.
For less experienced users who don´t have any programming skills, more than 300 designs to choose from are available. Creating your own website with hpage's user-friendly online editor then is as easy as working with MS-Word.
Experienced users enjoy an unlimited freedom in designing and editing their sites. In this case knowledge of HTML and CSS are requiered.
And if you still should have any problem, just ask one of the many other hpage users or the friendly support for help in the hpage-forum. There is hardly any problem that can't be solved with the ressources of the community: It's not a problem, it's a challenge!
Also wishes of users that mean an improvement for the system are taken seriously and are realized by the support-team.

Furthermore, www.hpage.com offers many advantages compared to other providers of webspace: for instance an unlimited amount of sites, lots of capacity to store your own graphics, music, downloads, etc. and: the best is that everything is absolutely for free.

After a while you might want to add more features to your site. Then the many extras that hpage has to offer come in real handy:

Here some examples: If you do not want to make all contents of your website public, you can edit a special password-protected member area, where only friends, family members or other registered people have access. This is only one of the many extras available at hpage.
Other extras, for example a newsletter for your visitors, your own ad-server, an own forum, a personal shoutbox, etc., can be purchased in exchange for points that you can earn when you log in, cast your vote for a website that is in the daily awards or win an award yourself with your own website ... If you like gambling, you can also take part in the jackpot-lottery. That means investing a small amount of points and, if you are lucky enough, you might win the jackpot and get many, many points in the end. And if you still feel that it takes too long to earn the amount of points that you need for your personal extra, you can still buy more points for an acceptable prize.

Of course the webmaster of a site from time to time wants to know who has visited his website. hpage offers almost complete transparency. Find out, how many users your site had on any day, which operating system the visitor uses, which resolution he had, which sites were viewed how ofte