How to Make a Website for Free

Contents

Why Have a Website?

     A website allows you to communicate your ideas and plans to anyone who reads it, whether they are around the corner or across the globe. This can attract participation and cooperation in your projects from other activists in your region. It can educate people anywhere in the world about your issues. It spreads your ideas so that other people anywhere in the world may learn from and build on them in their own projects. It may also attract support and cooperation in your project from allies in other parts of the world.

     A website is a tool that you use in your work. You use it primarily for communication, but you can also use it as an archive for recording historical information. You can create a site that conveys an important message and leave it there forever without changing it. Or you can constantly update your site with information about new activities, new research findings, new people involved in your project, etc.

How Can It Be Free?

     Websites are exciting, modern technology. How can it be possible to have one for free? There are two basic ways this can happen:

• Advertising. You probably already know about large Internet businesses, such as Yahoo, that offer free e-mail accounts. They do this because every time you look at your e-mail, they show you advertisements from their customers who pay them money for the privilege of showing you their messages. A free website works the same way, but instead of showing the ads to you, they are shown to the people who visit your website. Again, the Internet companies’ customers pay them money to put those ads on your website. This is a win-win-win situation. You get a free website, the Internet company gets money from its customers, and those customers get to show their message to your website visitors in the hope that they will buy something. The only drawback here is that you have no control over what ads will appear on your site. You will never know if they will be consistent with your project’s message and you don’t know if they might distract people from reading your site.

• Common Cause. If your project is of interest to a certain organization, they may be willing to “host” a website about the project as part of their work. They may do this with or without putting ads on your site, and they may put a banner on your site to indicate that they are hosting it. If the organization has goals and actions that are consistent with yours, then you might like having your site associated with them. Also, if they put ads on your site, they will probably have messages that are consistent with the purposes of your own project.

What Do You Give Up with a Free Site?

     A free website will have some limitations compared to a site that you would pay for.

• You are limited in the amount of information you can put on your site, although a free site can still be fairly large. For example, Tripod (the host of this site) limits all sites belonging to one user to 20 megabytes. That’s enough for about 2,000 printed pages of text plus over 100 full-color pictures about 10 centimeters square each, so that’s plenty of room for a lot of information.

• 	An overlimit error message   (Enlarge.)

  You are limited in the amount of information that your website can put out every hour or every day. This means that if your site is quite large and you get a lot of visitors all at once who access a lot of the information on your site, your site will be shut down temporarily for being “overlimit.” When this happens, there will be a certain period of time during which your visitors will get an error message instead of your site. The reason this happens is that the greatest cost to a Web “host” is the computer power needed to send out your information. If your site is very popular and quite large, then your host is using a lot of computer power to send out all that information. If you find out that visitors to your site are getting overlimit errors, this means that your site is becoming quite popular and you might think about finding a sponsor to help pay for a professional site.

• You will not be able to have your own “domain,” which is a Web address of the form, www.MyDomain.com. Instead, your Web address will be a subfolder on the domain of your host, like the address of this site, FreeAfrica.Tripod.com/makesitefree/.

• You are limited in the sophistication of the software that your site can use. For example, you will probably not be able to use “dynamic” pages that change automatically according to information entered by your visitors, although some “common cause” sites do allow this with “PHP” programming. You will probably also not be able to put Flash animations or streaming video on a free site.

     A free site is good for the communication of information, not for the fancy showmanship that many sites boast. If what is important about your site is its information content and if you don’t have too many people accessing it all at once, then a free site should be able to serve your needs very well.

What Do You Get with a Free Site?

     A free site will allow you to “upload” a certain amount of information to it for your visitors to see. Most of your content will probably be a combination of text and pictures, but you can also provide your visitors with special kinds of documents, such as files in Microsoft Word or Excel or even a short movie.

     Many free websites also come with simple tools for creating and maintaining a site quickly and easily. The tools that are available with free sites vary widely, so you might want to look around before you decide where to “host” your site.

     Most free websites come with one or more free e-mail addresses that can be used to communicate directly with people who visit your site. In fact, if you have a free e-mail address from an outfit like Yahoo, then you probably already have an account that allows you to make a free website connected with it.

Where Can You Get a Free Site?

     For advertising-based free sites, check out:

	•	Tripod
	•	AngelFire
	•	Google Sites
	•	Jimdo
	•	uCoz
	•	DotEasy (Web hosting free if you register a domain)
	•	Others listed in the Wikipedia category on Free Webhosts
	•	Review and comparison of some free Web hosting services by cNet

     For “common cause” sites, take a look at:

	•	MutualAid.org
	•	I’m not aware of other like this at this time, but they are around. If you know of others or come across a good one, please let me know and I’ll add them to this list.

Simple Examples of What You Can Do with a Free Website

     The best place to see examples of what a free website can do is to look at sites on the free Web “hosts,” such as those listed above. However, if you’d like to see what I’ve done with Tripod on behalf of some good causes in Kenya, take a look at:

	•	This site
	•	Who Owns Kenya? — What is the Queen Doing in Parliament?
	•	The Last Mau Mau — Kenya’s Freedom Heroes or Villains? by David Njagi
	•	Ogiek Land Cases and Historical Injustices by Towett J. Kimaiyo
	•	Mathare Youth Talent Organization — a site I created for them, currently maintained by MYTO themselves

     You will see that these sites are all quite simple. No fancy gizmos, just basic communication of information. You can do much more with some creativity and ingenuity.

How Do You Create a Site?

     Simple instructions are provided by most of the free Web hosts. You may also find it helpful to check out my page of suggestions for setting up a free site.