Elastic Media Freelance Web Design Leeds

So as part of managing my Personal Brand I've been looking into the places on the internet where you can set up for free. Free websites in other words. Back in the 60's the main player in this area was Goecities. They provided a relatively easy way to create a website and share with the world pictures of your cat. Geocities is no more, but arguably the likes of Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace have stepped in to fill that gap. Everyone now can have a 'presence' on the web.

But what if sharing cat pictures isn't your main concern. What if you're a fledgling business and want a professional website to reflect that? Generally you'd employ the services of a web designer, but if money was tight, how would using these free web services compare to a bespoke website?

As there are hundreds of services like this, for the sake of argument I'm going to thin the field. Any service that you can't visually customise your pages to reflect your branding has to go.

As an experiment I've created sites on the Blogger, Google Sites, and Tumblr. I gave myself roughly the same amount of time (a couple of hours) and found out what could be achieved.

My test was to produce something similar to elastic-media.com, which is more or less a blog. Admittedly, as most of these services are blog based, if your website doesn't look/work like a blog, you'll probably need a little more time.

First up we have Blogger from Google. [ http://elasticmedia.blogspot.com/ ]

The clue is in the name here. Blogger is a blogging service and as such, you can't really include static or separate pages in your site (let's say you wanted to add an 'about us' page). There's a way to do this using separate blogs-per-page, or post dating, but these are ugly workarounds. Having said that, without any knowledge of html, you can change your site's column order, include page 'gadgets' (such as link lists or slideshows), change fonts and colours and include a header image.

For the more adventurous, the 'layout' section of the provided dashboard allows you to get your hands dirty and edit template code. This is fairly standard ccs/html stuff and isn't too hard to pick apart.

If you spend a little time with blogger, you can achieve reasonable results, and the service itself (the dashboard) has a fairly good 'feel' to it.

Next up is Google Sites [ http://sites.google.com/site/elasticmedialeeds/ ]

Google Sites differs from Blogger in that it's designed to create and maintain static, standalone pages. It's not a blog and doesn't follow the posts/dates format.

In a similar way to Blogger, Google Sites allows you to shift page elements around, add background images, and change font colours etc, but that's all really. There's no access to html code at all, so it's much more difficult to brand your pages.

A minor point, but Google Sites has the least brand-friendly URL of all the services I've gone over here. http://sites.google.com/site/elasticmedialeeds/. Bad! As with all the services outlined here though, you can point your domain name to them.

Also, it may be just me, but the minimalistic style of Google Site's management pages aren't adding anything to the experience. Like a lot of Google applications, it looks like a work-in-progress.

It's not that horrid, but I'm not a fan.

Last but by no means least is Tumblr. [ http://elasticmedia.tumblr.com ]

Tumblr is gaining in popularity with social media types such as Gary Vaynerchuck and Kevin Rose.

Again, Tumblr is primarily a blogging platform although it's easier than Blogger to create static pages in my opinion. Simply create a 'private post', share it (which creates a static URL) and link to that URL in your theme. It took me longer to type that last sentence than it did to create the page!

Tumblr like Blogger allows you to get at the html/css, but the default template layout I found a little 'kooky' (Lot's of odd positional elements). Though obviously you can trash this and use any code you want.

I think Tumblr could be the most adaptable of the three, although I'm not biasing this on any standout reason.

In summary then, you get what you pay for. These sites may not be best suited to run as a main company website, but with their ability to introduce your own look and feel, might be very well suited to creating 'buzz' for your exhisting projects / products / content.

(also, claiming your name and cross linking these sites may help in the eyes of Google search)