If your SME or startup is running on a sparse budget, you can actually create a pretty nice DIY website yourself. In this article we’ll look at the best free DIY website creation and management tools.
What You Need To Start – To get going, you’ll need a domain name and some basic site hosting. A domain name really should not set you back any more than a few bucks from a site like GoDaddy. Similarly, cheap and reliable hosting will set you back no more than a few dollars a month from a leading host like Hostgator.
Now that you’re all up and running, take a look at these DIY website cool tools:
1. WordPress Is The Ultimate Content Management System. If you’re trying to research between different CMS systems such as WordPress, Joomla and countless others – save some time and just head on over to WordPress. It’s powerful, highly customizable and totally free. It is also very simple to set up – most good hosts offer automatic and simple WordPress set-up. This means you don’t even have to go through the FTP process in setting up WordPress on your domain name (hosting tools such as Simple Scripts will do all the work for you). Once your WordPress CMS is set up on your host, you can then choose from many different free and paid WordPress templates and plugins. From creating password protected membership sites to setting up your own social network, WordPress can handle it all and more.
2. Create Sizzling Site Graphics With Gimp. To really make your website stand out, you’ll want to create some eye catching graphics. Good websites are increasingly adding suitable images to embellish their content. Images can help break up text pages in a more attractive and readable way. A free tool like Gimp can help you photo edit pictures for use online. To find free images to use for your site, thumb through the Wikimedia site which has many images that fall under the commons licence.
3. SEO Friendly WordPress Plugins. Once your WordPress site begins to take shape, you’ll want to turn your attention to maximizing your SEO punch. A good site will be SEO friendly and court a lot of free Google traffic. To facilitate this, you can use many free plugins that can be added onto your WordPress site. However, one epic SEO plugin that you certainly should consider adding is the free SEO plugin from Yoast. The plugin can help you to manipulate keywords and many other SEO factors within your site to make it more attractive to Google. The Yoast SEO plugin helps you to use the right keywords in the right densities when you create your site posts. The plugin also enables you to set your robots meta configuration, breadcrumbs control and tons more.
You can browse through an entire directory of WordPress Plugins to pick out the ones you’d like to incorporate into your site. Just keep in mind that adding too many bulky plugins onto your site can hinder site speed and make the browsing process a little sluggish.