I think almost everybody in this modern age realizes the importance of a web presence. It’s already part of our culture and serves as the way to show ourselves to the world. Among the many available methods of establishing our existence in the virtual world, having a website is one of them.

But most layman internet users that I know shiver when they heard the phrases “web building” and “web design”. So I tried to compile a list of methods of how to build a web page without any web design skills in less than 5 minutes.

The Applications

Let’s start with the obvious: web building applications. The quickest and easiest way to build webpages and websites should be by using applications that are built specifically for that purpose.

Unfortunately, that is not always the case. While there are many powerful website builders, the ones that can help novice users to build webpages without any web building skills are next to none. Add the word “free” in there and you are looking at the (almost) impossible.

The only application that I could find which fits the quick, easy and free requirements is Apple’s iWeb. The app is part of the iLife Suite (costing $79), but the suite comes for free with every Mac purchase.

After setting up a new site, you can create a new page in iWeb. Go to the “File – New Page” menu. You’ll have your new page based on the pre-designed template that you chose.

The rest is just a matter of changing the text and replacing the photos.

What about other alternatives? One website building application that most users will be familiar with is the classic FrontPage from Microsoft (part of the Office Suite, again not free). Sadly, this fairly easy to use WYSIWYG Web Editor has been discontinued since 2006 and replaced by Expression Web – which is not WYSIWYG and also not free.

Dreamweaver might be one of the most powerful web builders, but it’s not free and also not for the faint of heart.

There are actually few free web building apps out there, such as NVU (discontinued) and Kompozer, but they are definitely not for novices.

The Web Services

On the other hand, there are virtually countless easy and free web building services in the virtual world. You might as well go wild and create more than a mere webpage but websites instead. We have discussed lots of them here in MakeUseOf, such as:

• Google Sites
• Flavors.me
• Wikia and other Wiki builders
• SnapPages

And don’t forget tons of free blog services out there like WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Posterous, Linkedin, Tumblr, and lots more. Using these services, you can have your own website(s) in no time. Let alone a webpage.

But if a page is all you need, it’s also possible. Let’s take WordPress as an example. In WordPress, creating a page is as simple as clicking “Add New” under the “Pages” side menu.

Fill in the information that you want to present. Add some images if you want to.

And after hitting “Save“, your page is ready, and the design is already taken care of by the theme that you use.

The Unthinkable Words

There is another quick way to build a webpage: using word processors. Most modern word processors, like Bean for Mac, or Microsoft Word for Windows, have the ability to save the pages as webpages (please note that I personally think this method is only fit to be used as a last resource when all others are unavailable. Still, you can create a valid webpage using it).

Most of us would agree that using MS Word just to type words would be an overkill. We have discussed several “uncommon” ways of using Word like building mind maps and creating wallpapers. So why not webpages?

If you know how to do a decent layouting with text and images (or how to use one of the templates from the Project Gallery as the basic), all that’s left to do is just save the page as a webpage.

To do that go to the “File – Save As” menu.

And choose “Web Page (.htm)” from the “Format” setting and hit “Save“.

Of course you can’t expect the result to be professional grade. Based on my experiment, the more complicated your layout is, the more messed up the result will be. So, if you really want to take this path of creating a webpage, keep the page display as simple as you can.

And surely there are other methods of creating a webpage other than these three. If you know of any other alternatives, why not share them using the comments below?

Image credit: tasteful