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There are a vast number of sites offering free Web home pages, but terms vary greatly from one offer to another. Here are the key things such an offer should include:
There are only a few true winners out there:
You’ll see all sorts of tempting offers for free site hosting out there, but there’s at least one catch to almost all of them. Compare anything you’re offered to the services described here before making a final decision.
I offer a brief description of each recommended option below; to find out more, visit each of the sites and compare the look, feel and offering yourself.
This is the free Web pages site that I recommend and describe in detail in Creating Web Pages For Dummies, 6th Edition – and which I’ve been recommending since the first edition in 1995! GeoCities quickly became the largest of its kind, and was eventually acquired by portal leader Yahoo!, so they must have been doing something right.
GeoCities offers 15 MB of free storage; professionally designed templates and (free) clip art, a reasonable URL for your site (www.geocities.com/username), a very simple PageWizards tool, a powerful PageBuilder tool, plus the ability to upload your own code. There are lots of freebies such as clip art, page counters, a guestbook, games, headlines, and detailed site statistics.
For all this, GeoCities requires that you offer some personal information when you sign up, and displays a large ad in the right rail of each Web page (but the user can minimize it with a single click). GeoCities also limits the amount of data transferred each day, which means your Web page may black out periodically if you host sound or video files on it. However, there’s no easier or more robust tool for getting started with Web publishing.
Lycos Tripod is a close second to GeoCities in the quality of its offering. (The CNET review I read reversed the order, putting Tripod slightly ahead of GeoCities, but I respectfully disagree.) Tripod offers a huge 50 MB of free storage and an even better URL than GeoCities (username.tripod.com), but some of your users may find it confusing for a URL not to start with ‘www.’. Tripod’s tools are a bit more limited than GeoCities’ – the choices are Site Builder, which comes with templates, and FreeForm for HTML. The free templates and free art aren’t as fancy as GeoCities’. The freebies are just about as extensive – more so in some respects - but the site statistics aren’t nearly as detailed.
Tripod requires that you offer a fair amount of personal information to get an account and displays an ad on your Web page; you can customize the ad, however, to share the overall look of your site, a nice advantage. Though I like GeoCities a bit better, you won’t go too far wrong if you start with Tripod.
For reasons I don’t understand, Angelfire seems to be the first choice of most people who haven’t read my book before choosing a free Web pages site. Maybe they’re impressed by the 50 MB of free Web space (same as Tripod’s) or the site’s overall popularity. But Angelfire forces you to use a longer URL than GeoCities or Tripod (www.angelfire.com/directory/username, where ‘directory’ is your locality or the topic of your site). Editing tools are less robust than the competition, and templates offerings are more limited. Add-ons are a subset of Tripod’s offerings, and every time I visit an Angelfire-hosted site I get at least one pop-up ad; very annoying!
Angelfire does distinguish itself by offering GIFWorks, a tool for modifying GIF graphics online. However, this isn’t enough, in my opinion, to raise it to the level of GeoCities or Tripod.
Keyword: Homepage
AOL offers a free Web page service that only allows you to create one page for free and that offers more limited tools and add-ons than the sites listed above. However, you get much more help from the AOL community than anyone else can offer, and it all works within the comfortable AOL environment. You may end up going to one of the alternatives listed above as you grow your site, but for great ease of use and strong support for your initial effort, AOL users can’t go wrong with Homepage.
The pros know something that many others don’t: the best place to create and test Web pages is on your own hard disk. You can use Windows Notepad to write in HTML, or work in Word and save the file as HTML. Or use a tool such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver to create your Web page.
I recommend working in HTML in Notepad, since you learn HTML and avoid certain kinds of complicated problems that come up with the other options. You can find Notepad by choosing Start-->Programs-->Accessories-->Notepad. Always save the file you create with the extension .htm so you can open it as an HTML file. (For instance, call your home page index.htm.)
If you’re a Mac user, try the fantastic BBEdit program (you can find a trial version at www.download.com, among other places.)
Once you’ve created an HTML file, using any of these options, save it to your hard disk. Then open it using a Web browser. From within your Web browser, just choose File-->Open and select the HTML file from your hard disk. Ta daa! You’re viewing your own first Web page, without even necessarily being online.
Then keep working on your page. You can make changes in your HTML file, save them, then click Reload in your Web browser. The changes instantly appear in the Web page.
This quick review loop removes many of the hassles that come when you create or test Web pages online. Using this technique, you can get 90% of the problems with a Web page removed before you ever upload it to a Web server.
Beginner’s note: An increasing number of computer users don’t know about file extensions, how folders work, how to download and install a program and so on. If you lack this knowledge, you’ll run into many problems in trying to create and edit Web pages. I suggest that you get a book such as Windows For Dummies or Mac OS For Dummies and learn how to do these basic things before you try to create and manage a Web page – or make sure to have a more experienced user around to help.
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