Free Website Design? If it Sounds To Good to Be True, It Often is!

Here is an article I found interesting.   Enjoy!

When you type “free website” or “free web design” into Google you will be presented with thousands of results and nearly as many businesses offering to take you step-by-step through creating your first website for FREE!

This sounds great, but is there a catch?

A couple of months ago I decided I wanted to improve my existing website to make it a bit more 21st century. I am a graphic designer and had previously designed my own websites using Dreamweaver, but didn’t know how to make them dynamic. They were static sites that just sat there collecting dust. I wanted a website that would be found in the search engines and ultimately, used to make me money!

So I Googled “free website” out of curiosity and I couldn’t believe what I saw. Dynamic, state-of-the-art websites – absolutely FREE! So without delay I immediately signed up and began building my FREE website. Unfortunately I discovered several problems which completely took the wind out of my sails.

Here are the problems…

I wanted to use my existing domain name I already had, but I soon discovered this was not going to be possible with the free website companies. Their domain names looked something like this: yourdomain.freewebsitecompany.com

Now for your new business to start off on the right foot you have to ask yourself, would I be happy with that domain name to represent my new business. Would I like it printed on my business cards, sign written on my vans or advertised on the web itself!?

The problem is these free “click and build” website companies are not offering a free domain name or web hosting, there are only giving you a sub-domain of their company. So to most people finding your new website will see the other company name alongside yours. And because its a sub-domain it looks as if you are linked to that company in some way. Now I don’t now about you, but I don’t want to be seen in this way. I want my own real domain on my own servers with complete control.

Let’s talk about the hosting now, since I touched on it in the previous paragraph. So as well as a bad domain name you will also get a bad hosting deal. All of your text and images you add to your website, as you build it, are stored on a server on the World Wide Web, not on your computer. So you are totally in the hands of these FWC’s.

The problem with the FWC’s is they will offer “limited” disk space and bandwidth, hoping you will upgrade to one of their paid web hosting packages. Another common problem is the use of advertising banners and links on your website to advertise the FWC’s services. Again this is messy and confusing to your site visitors. They are left unclear to who you really are and who you are working for and so suspicion is raised.

The third big problem, and this may well be the biggest of all, is you do not have access to your files, images or database. Everything you build over the years of having your website is owned by someone else. So what happens a few months or even years down the line when you decide you want to move your website to another hosting company, or to your own web hosting servers. You don’t have access to your files and the FWC will either charge you a fee to move your files to another hosting company or tell you it can’t be done. Is this really the best foundation on which to start your new business?

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mike_German