Free Website Hosting
Creating your own website can be an extremely rewarding experience. It's a step up from building a social media page, in terms of flexibility and independence, and your own website can even become a source of ongoing revenue for you - either at the hobby level or as a fully-fledged business. Websites can be expensive to create and host, but fortunately there are some free hosting options available, some of which come complete with ebsite creation tools to simplify the process of moving your content online.
WIX
- If you've ever been on YouTube, there's a good chance that you've seen an ad for the WIX website building tool. This popular offering has overtaken many of the website builders that came before it by offering a simple, drag-n-drop style website creation tool, bolted on to free website hosting. They fund this through also offering premium plans and domain registration services that offer increased functionality, but their free offering is still available as a solid starting point for many.
WEEBLY
- Similar to WIX in terms of approach and burgeoning popularity, Weebly - owned by Square, offers an effective set of tools to help move your business or personal website online. Simple enough that school students are often introduced to this platform as their first website creation experience, Weebly offers a code-free website builder and free sub-domain hosting (ie yourname.weebly.com).
WORDPRESS.COM
- It sometimes confuses people that there are two forms of Wordpress. The website Wordpress.org offers a popular content management system (CMS) named Wordpress, which professional web publishers download, install on their own hosting environments and tailor to their hearts' content. That's slightly different to the experience offered by Wordpress.com. The .com offering is similar to the installed Wordpress, except that it's fully hosted (free plan available), and somewhat feature limited. This is a great starting point for web publishers who are considering branching out to commercial publishing in the future, as it provides them with a taste of Wordpress, in a secure, fully-managed environment, before they move on to the installation, management and maintenance of their own Wordpress system when ready.
