The web is a very challenging place with many traps to catch you out. Free web builders appear to be excellent for someone wanting to get a website up and running quickly. Are they really free? Someone must be making money from this, because nothing in life is free.
Well the following applies to some but not all the ‘free website builders’. The usual method is to get the user to sign up and then sell them a domain name at an inflated price. After this they usually offer the free web building package. This will usually fall short of what you require and the pro package which will usually have a few features that tempt the user to opt over , after all the price of the pro option is usually only a few pounds per month. However this then leads to increased band width (the amount of data used) and this again is usually an area which then attracts a small charge per month for the bandwidth limits being exceeded
So from free to possibly £10 – £15 per month which will usually consist of a 3 – 5 page site which in fairness will have been constructed by someone with little or no understanding of the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) required to obtain a reasonable ranking within the top three search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo)
Again some free website builders can appear to be just the ticket to quickly get a site up and running and of course the code that you do not see will be just the same as a custom built site – right? Not always, is the true answer.
Setting up a search engine optimised site requires an understanding of the required code behind the visual wrapper that you will see. It can be all too easy to create a very nice looking site with very poor SEO code. The result is that a site such as this could be near impossible to find and often unable to be located for any search term entered.
So we have a site which from free is now costing a few pounds per month, hard to impossible to find in search engines and may not be displaying correctly in all the available browsers that are used.
Luckily the free website builders software has an option to use Google add words. This means that you can select some keywords that you feel reflect what customers would enter into a search engine. Google can then promote your business in search results with a cost for every click. Again for a few pounds per month you can suddenly have lots of visitors flocking to your site.
So free can mean – your time – small costs for different items – lack of visibility
Just so you are aware.
Author: Websitu
Head Honcho at Websitu - The buck stops here unfortunately
