By Sarah Jacobsson Purewal, PCWorld
Your company's online presence begins and ends with your website. But hiring a designer to dress it up can be expensive--and that's not even including the cost of a custom domain name and website hosting. Fortunately, you have do-it-yourself options.
If you need a basic website to house and promote your business, these five services let you design, publish, and host your site for free - or for a small monthly fee - all from the comfort of your browser.
These services all feature "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) website editors. In other words, you don't have to know a single line of code in order to build your own, professional-looking business website. Next, to make your brand's look and feel match your print materials, here's how to create print materials such as business cards and brochures.
Moonfruit is a free website host and editor with a plethora of fresh designs and detailed editing options. The service is moving away from its early focus on building Flash-based sites, which can't be viewed on iOS devices and are typically hard for search engines to find. Now, a site you build in Moonfruit is designed to render in Flash, HTML, or mobile HTML5, depending on how the user is accessing it. And soon there will be tools for building Facebook Pages.
Getting Started Getting started on Moonfruit is quick and easy--although mastering its site editor takes quite a bit of practice. First, simply choose a theme, which you can change later, if you desire. The modern-looking, business-oriented themes include IT Services, Accounting, Spa, Bakery, and Law. All are fully customizable, but if you don't see one that appeals to you, you can choose a dark- or light-skinned blank theme and build your site from the ground up.
Building and Editing Your Site Moonfruit has a ton of design options for building a site from scratch. Next, you can dive into the webpage editor. The Flash-based editor is full-featured but can be a little intimidating. Luckily, Moonfruit has a 40-page Beginner's Guide.
You can edit the Page Master, which houses the elements that will appear on every single page of your website (such as navigation links and your logo), or you can edit pages individually. The Webpage editor's toolbar includes options such as Save, Edit, Design, and Admin. Clicking these either opens a menu of additional options or brings you to other pages where you can set up various services.
While you're logged in to the editor, clicking any element on your website will open the element's "Editor" palette subwindow with tabs for options for editing text and styles, and more. Uploading files from your PC is a snap. Just click on the Files button in the toolbar to upload multiple images, video clips, or audio clips at once. If you'd rather use clip art or stock photos, Moonfruit has a library of images and multimedia elements.
Once you've finished editing your website, click Save and your site will go live.
Pricing Moonfruit's basic services are free for one website with up to 15 pages, 20MB of online storage, and 1GB of monthly bandwidth. To use Moonfruit's free features, you also have to update your site once every six months.
For those who need more, Moonfruit has packages from $6 to $50 per month ($54 to $450 per year if you pay annually). Its Business package is $25/month or $225/year, offering 15 websites with unlimited pages, 2500MB of storage, and unlimited bandwidth. That package also features an $80 Google AdWords voucher, email support, two domain names (with email addresses), multiple site administrator accounts, and PayPal integration.
Moonfruit Pros: Extremely customizable designs; plenty of attractive themes; small and unassuming ad on free pages; multiple packages; publishes in Flash, HTML, and mobile-optimized HTML5.
Moonfruit Cons: The WYSIWYG editor has a steep learning curve.
To see the complete article, click here
Last comments