Step 2.2 – Those Other “Free” Websites

There is another sort of free website that is available on the Internet; this one provides a free website for you (without the hosting) and you have the responsibility for finishing it with your (primarily advertising) information. The provider gets more advertising, the potential to get you to upgrade to their paid premium products (more flexible, easier to use, etc.), and one-way links to their site from every website you install (this is important for search engine optimisation or “seo” – more in another section later on), and maybe even direct advertising via “your” website ( “Powered by XYZ Websites” in the footer is one example).

There are two varieties that we have used, primarily so that we could put up information sites like the ones we referred you to above (and there will be more coming up). These serve three purposes for us:

• we get more information on the web for your use,
• we get seo in various ways from these, and
• we may get a little advertising income from the advertising contained in the websites (Google AdWords, Amazon, Clickbank, etc.).

Once the sites have been installed, they are more or less maintenance-free, but they should receive new content routinely to keep them “fresh” for the search engines and the readers. Here are the two types we have used:

Hyper VRE (“Virtual Real Estate”) is an operation that provides php website templates on a free basis, and the services to find content for them to provide a complete website. There is an add-on service called Hyper VRE Monthly that provides about ten website templates complete with header artwork every month (for a price), and there is an upgrade of that service that provides more options and flexibilty. Our experience with the monthly service is that IF you do a serious job and edit the content that is available so that it functions properly, makes sense, and looks good (primarily formatting problems as you download it), it takes 2-3 full days to put one website with about 100 pages on the web. With ten per month, that will fill your available time! Since the content is not unique (it’s made up of publicly available signed articles that you may not change), the seo effects are not so great. For an example, you can look at our “Web Hosting by Jimmy Craig website [we have not been able to install RSS feeds successfully in our Hyper VRE websites, but this is a hosting problem, not a website problem]. The way we have been modifying these sites to get more unique content is to add in new pages or replace existing ones – one-by-one – with our own content in the same general format (see http://webhostingbyjimmycraig.com/3-questions-for-web-hosting-2/web-hosting-plans.php for a one-page example). This gets to be difficult if you’re not still running the VRE service, since there can be a large number of pages where you might need to change a title (“Web Hosting by JC” has over 150 pages). If you’re interested in more information about these websites, please right-click here to download (to your desktop or where-ever) a case study about Hyper VRE.

Free Monthly Websites is another free php website provider we use. The websites are simpler to install than the HVRE websites – basically, all you need to do is to insert your information in a config file and publish! After you’ve done it once or twice, it only takes maybe 30 minutes of concentrated work, including the upload to the host. Again, there are two versions here, one that is really free with a fixed website, and another premium version that provides more flexibility and the possibility to modify your website as you like. One of our examples you can look at is Yeast Infections (I’m jut putting that back on line now – it was down for a long time for advertising reasons). The organisation for this operation provides one website per month, but complete with all the articles individually and as an e-book as well as being integrated into the website. Unfortunately, it was converted from a free site to a paid site last year, and I dropped it at that point.

Other Websites. We have the opportunity every once in a while to obtain another website that is “ready-to-run”, at least more or less. An example of one of these is Spyware Adware Malware that we refer to in one of the next steps. This is a so-called mega-site; it has 970+ pages and is about 18MB in size on the hosting platform! The quality of these more-or-less one-off operations varies drastically, but this one is pretty good. Also, they can be re-hashed sites from an earlier operation – in which case they may or may not function without problems today. Proceed here with caution.

At MMT (already mentioned above), you also get a free website builder with a complete on-line tutorial, free advertising, and a free seo-submitter (Internet search engine optimisation submission tool, so your website will become “known” to the search engines like Google and Yahoo!). This means that you get “everything” except the website for a reasonable one-time-only payment at MMT.

So, what has come out of this step?

• You can find free website hosting, but be careful!
• Look at what you get for nothing(!) – even at free, you can afford to be choosy. Make sure you understand the situation and it makes sense to you before you start – you’ll save yourself a lot of pain, strain, heartache, and frustration later on!
• Where can you go for more information? Try this informational website: Webhosting by Jimmy Craig

In the next step, we will talk about software, what you need, what’s free and what’s not, and why!