Free User Friendly Websites

catsareniice1 · January 2015

I would like to build a website to sell things on instead of using ebay/Etsy. While I've heard of some free ones I wonder which ones are good and reliable.

Does anyone know from personal experience of a great provider?

simplyelise · January 2015

It will be difficult to find a completely free option for this. How much web design experience do you have?

Wordpress is the most customize-able and it's fairly user friendly. But if you've never used it before and you don't know basic html, it can be difficult. They have great user forums and a ton of plugins and lot's of free templates (called themes). But I don't really think any of the free themes are particularly good for store sites.

Weebly is probably what I'd recommend, but you aren't going to be able to do the store option with a free account. It's SUPER user friendly and easy to design and edit. I have one site set up with weebly right now on the starter package (it was under $50 for the year of membership) and it has some of the options for a store but it looks like you can only have up to 10 items and it has some other limitations. You could start with that plan, then when your store picks up, upgrade to the primo plan, which is like $20 a month, has SSL security on the site (the little green check mark) and it has a ton of store support, calculates shipping and tax, and doesn't take any % out of the payments you receive (ie paypal and the lower weebly store plans take about 3% of each transaction).

If you really want to go completely free (aside from purchasing the domain), I'd do the free Weebly option and then have a "store" option on the top or side bar which links to an etsy page with your stuff. That way you can still have a site, but etsy handles the money. The only other option that's completely free (aside from payment fees) would be to have just a straight paypal payment option on the free weebly site. But I don't think you're likely to get much business because people don't trust that.

I'm not sure what other free ones you've heard of, but I'd say that you absolutely want to own your domain so that if you need to change hosting plans/sites, you can still keep your domain.

catsareniice1 · January 2015

Thank you! The ones I heard of are web.com and Weebly. There was one more but I can't think of it.

Weebly sounds reasonable!

vlagrl29 · January 2015

I built my website for free on my macbook thru iWeb. I don't know if you have access to that, but it was very easy and user friendly. I host mine thru webintellects.com - great customer service and I pay $6.95 per month. You do have to buy your domain name as well - I think its a $24 fee for 2 years and then you will renew it. If you want to sell things off your website I suggest advertising thru google so your website will come up in a higher ranking amongst the pages.

catsareniice1 · January 2015

vlagrl29 said:

I built my website for free on my macbook thru iWeb. I don't know if you have access to that, but it was very easy and user friendly. I host mine thru webintellects.com - great customer service and I pay $6.95 per month. You do have to buy your domain name as well - I think its a $24 fee for 2 years and then you will renew it. If you want to sell things off your website I suggest advertising thru google so your website will come up in a higher ranking amongst the pages.

Great! Thanks!! Listing on Google is a great idea!

simplyelise · January 2015

Advertising with "google adwords" doesn't actually boost your search results.

Do some research on SEO (search engine optimization) and decide which search terms you want to rank on page one for. Be thoughtful because you won't ever rank for just "jewelry" or something like that. But maybe if you have a unique product, you could rank for that. But you'd need to be optimizing every page for the keywords and regularly writing blog post content to stay relevant in the search results. You can frequently get a free $100 google adwords credit, so definitely use it if you have it, but that only affects ad space on searches, not actual results or rankings.

There are other marketing options though. I'd recommend twitter and pinterest. If you wrote some good blog posts somewhat related to the products and then pinned them all over pinterest, you could get some traffic that way. Maybe you could do some youtube vlogs about a related topic and link to the site. You could also advertise on some local sales sites (craigslist and facebook local groups) with a link to your store.

Marketing and SEO are a lot of work. It takes daily attention. What kind of products are you hoping to sell?

hoffse · January 2015

My husband uses squarespace, but he sells products (music scores) directly through it. We pay $20/month to have the upgraded version because that gives shoppers/clients a secure way to pay through the website without being re-routed somewhere else. We talked about doing one of the cheaper plans and decided that if we were interested in buying one of his scores, we probably would pass if we couldn't pay securely and easily. I simply will not enter CC information on any website that's not secure, and many people feel the same way. The $20/month also includes the domain name.

vlagrl29 · January 2015

simplyelise said:

Advertising with "google adwords" doesn't actually boost your search results.

Do some research on SEO (search engine optimization) and decide which search terms you want to rank on page one for. Be thoughtful because you won't ever rank for just "jewelry" or something like that. But maybe if you have a unique product, you could rank for that. But you'd need to be optimizing every page for the keywords and regularly writing blog post content to stay relevant in the search results. You can frequently get a free $100 google adwords credit, so definitely use it if you have it, but that only affects ad space on searches, not actual results or rankings.

There are other marketing options though. I'd recommend twitter and pinterest. If you wrote some good blog posts somewhat related to the products and then pinned them all over pinterest, you could get some traffic that way. Maybe you could do some youtube vlogs about a related topic and link to the site. You could also advertise on some local sales sites (craigslist and facebook local groups) with a link to your store.

Marketing and SEO are a lot of work. It takes daily attention. What kind of products are you hoping to sell?

It does boost mine. I pay monthly to advertise on google and I put in all keywords that apply to my expertise. On a few of those keywords I pay a little more per click so I can be on the first page. I've also made a little ad thru google and it appears either at the top or side - separate from the other listings.

I also go to google and yahoo/bing to enter my url every month to keep it near the top - I'm almost always on page 1 or 2 in google

I know on iWeb you can add a paypal widget for customers to pay on

vlagrl29 · January 2015

OP - do you mind me asking what kinds of things you want selling?

simplyelise · January 2015

Right, searching for your own URL is always going to show up high in the rankings.

Paying for google adwords doesn't boost you in the actual search results. It's going to make you show up in the ad space at the top or sides. But research on user behavior shows that people tend to skip over things they know are ads so that you can look at the actual results.

You searching for your own URL doesn't affect searches at all.

SEO is a constantly changing ballgame. I worked in it full time for a while, but now I only do it occasionally as web manager at my company. But since web manager is just one hat of mine, I don't keep up 100% with the current strategies. But google's search algorithm trend has been to value pages higher when they have regularly new and relevant content.

simplyelise · January 2015

And I've heard good things about square as well. That's what my wedding photographer used. She always preferred that we pay by check though because of the fees taken out. But for a startup, I don't think the fees would be prohibitive for you.

simplyelise · January 2015

This is a good basic introduction on SEO: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/google-in-the-enterprise/seo-101-how-search-engine-optimization-really-works/

You can't pay to be higher in the actual search results. Can you imagine how terrible that would be? It would be only large multi-million dollar companies and you'd never be able to find local results or obscure sites.

hoffse · January 2015

simplyelise said:

And I've heard good things about square as well. That's what my wedding photographer used. She always preferred that we pay by check though because of the fees taken out. But for a startup, I don't think the fees would be prohibitive for you.

Yeah one of the things H really likes about it is how minimal/streamlined their web designs look. He's selling his own music compositions, so he wanted something that looked pretty contemporary and artistic, and their basic templates fit the bill. He didn't have to do much work to achieve the look he was goign for. I'm sure weebly has similar designs, but after looking at a lot of websites hosted through various groups, he liked the look of the squarespace websites the best.

http://www.squarespace.com/templates/

vlagrl29 · January 2015

iWeb does have an SEO tool that you can upload your website thru. I basically add all possible keywords in that tool and upload my website thru it which also helps my ranking. Most of the business I get is thru google so I must be doing something right. A combination of all these things is really the way to go.

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