MakeUseOf » free website

Create A Really Useful Personal Information Dashboard Page With Google Sites

Ryan Dube — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 21:31:20 +0000

Creating webpages used to be such a tedious process. Aside from the hassle with deciding where to publicly host the page, you needed to learn HTML and then figure out how to program the page so that it didn’t look like some amateur threw it together.

These days, there are countless websites that will let you create a webpage in mere minutes, without any knowledge of HTML whatsoever. We’d covered all sorts of websites and tools that you can use for this, like the four web design tools I wrote about, or other tools like OnePager or Zooloo. One of the fastest and quickest tools that I previously covered was Google Sites.

Fabricating Your Own Useful Dashboard

After using Google Sites for a while, I discovered some additional cool ways that it is integrated with other Google tools. That integration makes it a very powerful and easy way to put together your own personal information dashboard in no time.

To build your own person data/information dashboard, start by going to Google Sites and creating a site of your own. Give it a unique name, but at the bottom of the page, make sure to check off “Only people I specify” to make the site a private one.

This is important, because some of the information that you’re going to bring into the page may include personal details or statistics that are only for your information. This might include information you don’t want the public to see, like the Analytics data from your website, or the RSS streams you’re following to come up with new ideas to write about.

On the main page of your new Google site, click the “Edit” button at the top of the window.

This puts the page in edit mode. What many people may not realize is that there are a bunch of premade gadgets and widgets that can help you make a very dynamic website with very little effort. You can see those by clicking on the “Insert” menu item.

Then, click on “More gadgets…” to view the Google Gadgets database.

There are tons of really useful, high-quality gadgets listed in here. But, don’t get me wrong, there’s also a lot of junk. Try to stick to the “Featured” category for the highest quality gadgets.

Embed RSS Streams To Your Page

One of the ones that I find to be the most useful is the “Google RSS” feed gadget. Choose that gadget, and then you’ll get to the Properties page.

This is where you can integrate an RSS stream widget onto the site that is tailor-made to provide you with a collection of information tailored specifically to what you want to see. How do you do this when there’s only one RSS feed URL field?

Easy, check out RSSMix, and use it to combine as many different RSS streams from around the net as you like into one core stream that you can embed on your own personal information page. Depending on the type of dashboard information page you’re trying to build, this stream can be a collection of whatever specific information that applies to the purpose of the dashboard. Is it your own finance dashboard? Collect relevant RSS streams from around the web and display that on this page.

Display Spreadsheet Data In Graph Form

The other really cool Gadget that you’ll see in the Insert menu is if you click on “Chart” rather than “More Gadgets“. The Chart gadget is integrated right into Google Docs. You can import any spreadsheet of data in your Google Docs account to create graphs of that data right on your new dashboard.

All I did to create this particular chart is export my Google Analytics website data to a CSV file (you can do this from inside Analytics), and then stored that CSV file in my Google Docs account. This allows Google Sites to see that data and import it into graph format.

Once you’re done laying out the data in the way that you want it to display in the graph, just click okay and now the graph is updated on your page. Pretty cool huh?

Display Dynamic Calendars On Your Dashboard

Another useful gadget in the “Insert” menu is the Calendar tool. This lets you insert any of your personal Google Calendars into your Google Site page. If you think about it, having a calendar embedded on a web page often takes a bit of work, because you need to use embed code to pull data from some calendar stored on another site, or a calendar app installed on your own server, in order to have a dynamic calendar.

But with Google Sites, it’s completely seamless.

Choose your calendar, click “Select” and you’re done. If you choose a two column layout for your page, you can easily lay out these gadgets side by side on the page.

Once you’re done integrating your Google services and embedding various gadgets onto your Google Sites page, save it and then check out how cool your new, dynamic webpage looks.

This is a lot like other dashboard pages like Netvibes, but it is more tightly integrated with your Google services. I’ve noticed that the gadgets here seem to work better and update faster than when you try to embed your Google information into a page like Netvibes. It’s also nice to quickly import docs, spreadsheets and charts right from Google Docs with just the click of a button.

If you’ve put off trying Google Sites, I highly recommend revisiting it, and trying out all of the cool integration tools that you’ll find in the “Insert” menu. You may be surprised just how dynamic and useful a dashboard page you can create for yourself.

Build A Slick, Professional Website For Free With Weebly

Erez Zukerman — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 22:31:25 +0000

The other day, I was checking out a freeware app called Folder Axe; it’s a lovely utility with an equally-lovely website, that feels elegant and professionally crafted. Imagine my surprise when I scrolled down to the site’s footer and discovered it is powered by (and created using) a free service for creating websites, called Weebly. I was surprised for two reasons – one, the site just felt well-made, and did not seem like a cookie-cutter type of affair. And two, there were no ads, no annoying popups or anything else that might indicate this was a free service. Naturally, I decided to check out Weebly, and below you can read (and see) what using the service is like.

Important note – while Weebly’s free option is excellent, the service does offer a paid version for $4.58/mo for a six-month subscription, all the way to $2.99/mo if you sign up for two years. Some of the options are only available in the paid version, but they are clearly labeled in the interface. For this review, we’ll be looking at the free service.

Upon signing up, you’re presented with a large and simple form letting you pick out a name for your site, and specify its type:

For this review, I’ll be going with a personal website. Next, you get to pick an address for your site. You can either use a subdomain of Weebly, register your own domain, or use one that you already own. I decided to use a Weebly subdomain.

That’s it for the setup process. It’s now time to start crafting your website, and you’re taken to the visual editor. It uses an interface similar to Microsoft’s Ribbon, which should feel familiar to anyone who’s used a recent Office version.

To get started, you just need to drag and drop elements onto the page. When you drag an element onto the page, you get instant feedback showing you where you can drop it:

In no time, you can end up with a layout like this:

However, you may not like the general default design. Fortunately, you can select any one of a gazillion (I counted) possible themes, presented in an easy-to-browse gallery format:

I went for a dark theme with a vertical menu:

Quite different from the look I started out with, right? But if I wanted to, I could take it up a notch and customize it even further using the built-in HTML/CSS editor:

The site looks good (if dark, grungy themes are your thing), but it only has one page. Let’s remedy that, using the Pages menu:

Adding pages couldn’t be simpler; you just click Add Page and fill in the form. What’s interesting is that you can also add a blog to your static site, by simply clicking the Add Blog button. Your blog fits with your theme, and you can manage it using the same interface you use for designing the site:

You don’t have to be the only one working on your site. Using the Editors tab, you can easily allow other people and collaborate with them on the site. Using the free version you can only add other administrators, but the paid version also lets you add authors (who can edit only pages you specify) and dashboard users who can review stats or manage comments only.

Last but not least, let’s take a quick look at the Site Settings:

The SEO section is a nice touch. Google doesn’t really use Meta Keywords for ranking anymore, but the other options are certainly handy, and points novice users in the right direction.

Final Thoughts

Weebly strikes a fine balance between complexity and ease of use. The “Pro” options scattered throughout the interface can get a bit irritating after a while, but the free version is definitely powerful enough for most personal and small-business websites. All in all, it’s a lovely tool.

Make Your Own Free Multipurpose Web Page With Google Sites

Ryan Dube — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 23:31:50 +0000

As a blogger and owner of multiple websites, it isn’t often that I personally have the need to make free webpages that aren’t hosted on my own webhosting account, or accessed from my own registered domain. However, as anyone who has become entrenched in the world of Web 2.0 knows, there are so many available resources that it’s sometimes difficult to remember all of the sites where you’re a member, or to keep track of all of the information you want to receive updates about every day.

I’ve previously covered 4 free websites where you can make a web page for free, hosted by the site where you create them. Additionally, if your intent is to generate a start page for yourself, Aibek covered a majority of them in his review of the top 12 start pages.

All of the resources listed above are excellent tools for organizing your own online interests, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a resource from Google – the place where you get your email, handle your blog analytics and read your RSS feeds? Aibek mentioned iGoogle in his list of start pages, but even iGoogle doesn’t have the sort of flexibility that lets you do anything you want with the page. You can add widgets and re-title a few elements, but that’s about it. That’s why I was very happy to discover that now, even Google offers a free website building tool called Google Sites.

How To Make a Web Page for Free On Google Sites

Of course, if anyone could simplify the website creation process even more than most other free website creator tools, it would be Google. The nice thing is that your Google Site is tied directly to your Google account, so you never have to worry about remembering what the site was or the URL, just log into your Google account, go to Google Sites, and there it is.

When you first visit Google Sites and log into your Google Account, just click on “Create Site,” and you’re presented with a very easy form to fill out that will immediately generate your free webpage. Of course, the first step is to select the design. You’ve got several standard templates to choose from, or you can review the template library.

You could also use one of the common templates, but I usually like to use templates that are as unique as possible so as to reduce the possibility of having a site that’s identical to someone else’s. Additionally, the templates offered by Google are not your run-of-the-mill website templates.

If you want to have a project wiki website, there’s a template specially designed for that. If you want to have a family site, a school webpage, or even a professional website for yourself – there are templates for those purposes too. Each template has a unique design and features that are conducive to each purpose.

Even though I have a domain for my own name where I host a blog with updates from my online writing work, I don’t really have a professional website that collates all of my work, testimonials from clients and everything else into one easy to follow presentation. So, as an example website I’m going to use Google Sites to create my own professional bio page.

Once you fill out a few details on the form for your site title and description and then click submit, your site is ready to go using the template you’ve selected. All of your editing and other tasks are located at the upper right of the page.

Now, the cool thing about the Google Sites approach is that it’s configured like a content management system – so when you choose to “edit” the page, what you’re editing is just the content area. If you want to make any changes to the site template itself, you need to click on More Actions -> Manage Site, and then click on Site Layout from the left menu. This is where you can alter the left navigational bar and of course the site logo that, in this case, features your image.

Adding or removing navigational sidebar items is fast and easy in this area as well. Add or remove pages, or include text or widgets into the sidebar right here in one place, and it takes effect across your entire site and all pages.

Google has really done a fantastic job making it easy to customize and manage even large sites that have lots of pages. Of course, tools that you use all the time on your websites are built right into your Google Site, like Adsense. All you have to do is select to enable it.

The thing that separates the useful CMS tools from those for kids is the ability to integrate it with your own registered domain. Luckily, if you choose “Web Address” in the site management area, you’ll find that you can use any domain that you like with Google Sites. Keep in mind that the site is still hosted at Google, but at least you can use any custom URL that you like, rather than the generic Google Sites URL.

In the General Settings area, you can see just how integrated other website Google tools are into Google Sites. Just by pasting your Analytics ID, you can enable Analytics for the site (no need to copy and paste code into the footer of all the pages you want to track). Google Webmaster Tools verification is built right in as well.

For anyone who has ever wanted a monetized website with Google Analytics tracking, but never got around to it because it always seemed too complicated to integrate into your own website – with Google Sites, Google makes it an absolute breeze. Without further ado, here is the first draft of my own professional bio website called DubeWriter at Google Sites.

Take a look and let me know what you think. Keep in mind that the site was created in under 15 minutes, using the tools provided right on the Google Sites CMS.

Have you ever tried Google Sites? Do you find it easier or harder to use than other free website creators out there? Share your opinions and insight in the comments section below.

Create Your Own Free High School Reunion Websites

Karl L. Gechlik — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:31:02 +0000

Are you getting older? Do you miss the good old days of high school? Well maybe a trip down memory lane or a high school reunion will perk you up. If you are ahead of your 10 or 20 year anniversary you can organize a reunion with your own free high school reunion website.

We will show you two websites and services that will help you facilitate this. Check them out below and if you have others that you have used in the past (and are free or have a free option) list them in the comments for the greater good of the group!

The first free high school reunion website we will be taking a look at is called Reunion Watch. When you get to their website, their homepage looks like this:

They have a lot of features such as message boards and email service with a @ReunionWatch.com email address. They also have guest books, templates and 12MB of storage”¦(this is not 1999! But you can upload images to another site and link to them from your Reunion Watch website to save on file size).

The link on their homepage to build your free high school reunion website is probably what you are looking for if you are reading this article. That will take you to here:

From this page you can set up a domain name you currently own, register a new domain or use a free sub-domain of Reunion Watch. This is the option that we will choose and the easiest of them all. They then provide different plans but as you know MakeUseOf loves free. So we will be using the free one and making the most of it.

Then they tell you for $5 you can get rid of the ads on your high school reunion website. Guess what – we don’t care about them and we will leave them be!

You then continue on to set up your website. When you are done you will have something that resembles this example:

The site looks a little like it was created in 1999 but it is very functional and with improved graphics you can make the site appear as you want it. Here is the sample site:

Another website that allows you to set up a high school reunion site is ClassCreator. When you arrive at their homepage you will see this:

Clicking on Create Site in the menu bar will take you to here:

They will ask you to recommend an administrator if you do not feel you are the best one. Chances are you are, so just continue on and choose your country, city, state and graduation year like so:

Then schools will appear. Choose your school and continue on. You will be asked a boatload of questions like your school’s colors, website color, notifications, messages, contact information and a lot more. Answer only what you want and skip what you don’t need. You can always go back and fix it later.

When you are done you will pick a template and boom just like that you will be live. This site has a lot more options than the first so choose which way you want to go! And have fun out there!

Flavorsme – Create Your Own Free Personalized Webpage

Bakari Chavanu — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:31:34 +0000

Twittering the other night, I stumbled upon a service called Flavors.me. It’s a personal portal website for linking all your content from around the Internet. Which means that visitors to your Flavors.me page will get links to say your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Posterous, Netflix and other social networking and content sites. It’s a one-stop place where you can create your own free web page to let others know what you’re up to, and what you’re producing.

If this makes you yawn because it seems like just another interconnected social networking site, then you”˜re overlooking the main, well, flavor, of the site. The flavor is like assorted candies because although you don’t need to know a bit of CSS or HTML code to lay out your page, you can completely customize the background, fonts, colors, and layout of the elements of the site. While there are similarities between each flavorme page, you can customize yours enough to make it uniquely your own.

Flavors.me is still at a beta invite stage (for my MUO readers however, my invitation code to you is “heat” (without the parenthesis.) After registering and signing in, you’re ready to lay out your page.

Add Services

You’ll first be asked to add “services” links to your other websites. As you can see, Flavors.me links to most of the popular sites on the Internet. If you’re producing Internet content in the way of videos, blog posts, status updates, travel plans, resume details, and music listening habits, then you’re probably doing so on at least one or more of these sites. For specific sites not listed, you probably can use the RSS service for your custom RSS feed, as I used for my MUO articles feed.

After developing your list of services, you can re-order them, edit the titles, or remove selected ones if need be. It’s really simply and fast.

View Site & Customize Layout

After adding services, you click on the View Site at the top of the page. You will get a clean generic layout to begin with. Of course, though, because you’re a content producer and not just a content reader, and because you’re unique, you”˜ll want your site to have a unique identity. So you do this by using the Design Panels, accessed at the top-right of the page.

Adding Background

The Designs Panel begins with the Layout, but I would suggest starting with Backgrounds. Think about how you want your background to look. Do you want it to be a simple one-color page or do you want to use an image background? If my layout doesn’t inspire you enough, do a quick search on Twitter to get links to a growing list of other Flavors.me pages. Each of them are different.

As for your background, you can upload more than one image and try different ones. If you use an image background, you might want to start with an image that is at least 880 pixels in size, so as to fill up a typical webpage. You have options of tiling that image to fill up the background, or placing it on the left, right or center. It’s really all about playing around and getting the look and feel you want.

Layouts

Once you get an image uploaded, choose one of the three layouts for your page. Yes, the layouts are fairly limited, but I’m sure there will be more coming on board in later upgrades. However, these layouts provide a simple, uncluttered, clean look for your page. Making your page unique is based on the fonts and color palettes you use.

Fonts and Color Palettes

Selecting the fonts for your site’s name and content list is pretty straight forward. You get about 20 flavors of fonts to choose from for your name. Which one you choose is simply based on the design feel that you want to convey on your page. If most of your content is playful and personal, you might choose a fun font. If you’re using the site for resume purposes, you might select something more stylish and elegant.

The trickiest part of the site creation is using the color palettes. You are provided with presets of color palettes to try. But if you have a little time and patience, I suggest clicking on the Edit palette button where you have complete control of what color combinations you want to use. This is where you select the color for your site’s background, title, navigation (services list links), etc. You can save your palette and experiment some more. Too bad, however, you can’t save the entire layout and then revert back to it if you decide to make some changes.

View Site

As you work with your site, click on the View Site link at the top-right of the page to see how it looks. No doubt, you’ll make several changes before you’re completely satisfied.

So what do you think? Is this a service you would use? If you get a chance to create your own Flavorsme page, please come back and share it with us on MUO.

Design Your Own Online Portal Website for Free with Zooloo

Mahendra Palsule — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:00:57 +0000

Zooloo provides you one place to create, connect and control your online life, including your own website, dashboard, widgets, blog, news, social networks, photos, and videos. While this may sound ambitious, Zooloo is geared towards inexperienced users who want a simple way to design their own website for free and engage in their favorite online activities.

Zooloo consists of the following components that you can use to design your own portal website for free:

zSocial: Social networking with Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter with single status update across all networks
Dashboard: Personalized dashboard for news, photos, events, email, etc.
Site Creator: Website and blog builder with themes and widgets
Privacy Manager: Control who sees which parts of your website
Photos/Videos: Online photo organizer and video library
Calendar: Calendar, address book, reminders and to-do lists
Entertainment & Shopping: Customized online entertainment for music, movies, etc. and favorite shopping sites

Homepage with Social Networking

The homepage has a search box at the top, zStatus and zSocial on the main page, and widgets on the right to upload photos, access email, calendar and your blog.

zStatus is a status update box from where you can update your status across Zooloo, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Below that is zSocial, where you can interact with these social networks. Clicking the tab each network shows relevant sub-headings: for example, Facebook lets you choose between News Feed, Status Updates, Photos, Wall & Friends.

You can choose the background of your home page from several themes.

Your Dashboard

You pick and choose widgets to create your personalized dashboard. The dashboard is organized with tabs at the top, so you can create multiple tabs for different areas of interest. Clicking Add Widgets opens up a gallery of widgets that you can drag and drop to any tab on your dashboard. Widgets that need access to your login or profile need to be customized from the Options button on that widget.

The widget gallery is quite impressive ““ some of the popular types include:

Social Tools ““ Email, Social Networks, Photo-sharing, etc.
News Feeds ““ CNN, New York Times, etc.
Entertainment ““ Last.fm, iTunes Media

You can see the list of widgets available in Zooloo here. From within your dashboard, you can listen to podcasts and watch videos without leaving your site. You can rearrange widgets with drag and drop and customize the theme. Your dashboard is private, so nobody else sees it at any time.

Build Your Zooloo Website

With a free Zooloo account, you get a yourname.zooloo.com website for free. Your website includes profile, photo, video, graffiti, blog, and three custom pages. With a $30 annual subscription for Zooloo Plus, you can use it with your own domain name and some extras.

The zCreator website builder is very easy to use. You can choose from different layouts and themes for your website. You add content placeholders by drag and drop and fill them with the text and images to build your website.

Each page of your website is private by default. You can choose to share individual pages, photo albums, and videos publicly, or with specific friends on Zooloo. The privacy settings are easy to use and offer granular control over who sees what on your website.

Blogging and Graffiti

Zooloo also offers a simple interface to add a blog to your website. The blogging service supports categories, comments, and photos/videos. You can also import your blog from Blogger.

Graffiti is Zooloo’s social bookmarking or clipping service. Using a bookmarklet from any browser, you can quickly clip a link, photo, or video on your Graffiti page. Graffiti posts also have comments so you can comment on your friends Graffiti items.

More About Zooloo

Zooloo is an easy-to-use, attractive option for non-geeks to have their own website and a central place for social networking and infotainment. The owners of the site say that they are not competing with established social networks like Facebook, but complementing them. There are already over 20,000 users of Zooloo from each state in the US and 76 countries. Users are buying from within their shopping malls inside Zooloo using PayPal. There are plans for an iPhone application as well.

Will you try out Zooloo or recommend it to someone? Do you prefer any other free website/dashboard service? Let us know in the comments!

How to Create Free Websites Instantly to Share Information Fast

Eyal Sela — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 22:01:45 +0000

Have you ever felt envious of bloggers for having the platform to share whatever is on their mind? Well, nowadays there is no need to maintain a fully fledged blog in order to share cool things you find, interesting email you get and other things that require setting up a web page.

You can easily create free websites instantly in order to share content with the world. Here are some web applications that will allow you to share files and emails, create anonymous web pages and annotate links you share.

Note that all the applications presented here are registration-free and only require one or two mouse clicks to get going. Another advantage is that they save the time of opening attached files or reading text offsite. After you set them up you can easily share them via Twitter, email, Facebook and so on.

Transform an email into a webpage

Moomeo is a nifty little web service that transforms an email into a public webpage. Just forward any email to post@moomeo.com and within a minute you’ll get back a link you to a webpage you can share.

The webpage contains exactly the email you sent, with the attachments displayed in a sidebar, along with some sharing options (Twitter, Facebook and more). At the bottom of the page people can comment. See a screenshot below or visit a live example.

Go ahead and try it right away! Send an email to post@moomeo.com.

File to webpage

file2.ws is a great tool for sharing files by using them to create free websites instantly. It can handle numerous kinds of files, including images, audio, documents, programming source code, web documents, and archive.

To set up a file based webpage, click ‘Choose file‘, browser for a file on your computer (up to 15 MB), and click ‘Start conversion‘.

Once uploading is done, you’ll see a link to the webpage. People with whom you share it will be able to see the file without downloading or opening it. If they do wish to save the file to their computer – there is a direct link at the bottom of the page.

Here is an example of an Excel file I’ve shared.

Start from scratch

Several services will let you create a standalone webpage from scratch. Copytaste, Dinkypage, and Pastehtml will all do the work, each with its own special features. The services vary in the ability to comment, adding or not adding advertisements and so on. All work within a single click and allow you to edit the HTML or just write plain text.

Annotate any webpage

Pagetweet is designed to let you annotate webpages before you share them. You can add a 140-character comment at the top of any webpage.

After you enter the page’s URL and add the comment, you’ll get a link to the exact same page, with the comment at the top of it. People who visit this link will see the webpage along with your comment. If they forward it – other people will see your comments as well, so it is better than just sharing a link via Twitter or email.

See below how an annotated webpage looks like. Visit the actual page here.

Do you know other cool ways to share content online? Share it with us in the comments!

Image Credit : Immagina

How To Build a Free Website That Makes Money Without Any Coding

Guy McDowell — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 22:01:06 +0000

I’d been hearing snippets of talk about a company that offered a way to make a website without programming. Then I heard that they make it dead easy to add all sorts of money making content on your site, without you having to go sign up for affiliate programs. Then I heard that you can get this for free. Even better, you can attach your own domain name to the site and effectively get free hosting. Seriously.

DevHub is the site I’m talking about. So I went to check it out and make my own revenue generating site. I was very skeptical that any sort of website making application could turn out anything that looked and ran decent at all. For years I worked with various content management systems like Red Dot, Joomla, WordPress and Spectra. All of them required some degree of programming to make a decent web site.

Here’s how you can make your website.

First, go to DevHub and begin the sign up process. It’s a very easy thing to do. Just look on the homepage for the very obvious button.

From there, it asks you for some typical sign-up information: first name, last name, e-mail address. Nothing too intrusive. Again, very easy. At this point you can choose your own sub-domain or let DevHub know that you are going to use your own domain. I went the subdomain route, because although I love my dear readers, I’m not buying a domain name just for a demonstration.

As you can see, the site has a very distinct Web 2.0 feel. Typically I don’t care for that sort of design, but it works extremely well, when the application functions simply and smoothly.

This is where the money making begins. On this page, you can choose what kind of revenue generating modules you’d like to include in your website. I decided to use all of them, for testing purposes.

So there you go, some of it is affiliate revenue, and some of it is pay-per-click (PPC) type advertising. I’m guessing that DevHub sets up these relationships and then takes a slice of whatever your page makes and passes the rest on to you. Sounds like a decent business model to me. I just wish I had thought of, and executed, the idea as well as DevHub did.

Next, you pick out the physical layout of the site. One column with header, two columns with header and so on. each layout has it’s own strengths and weakness, so try to think about how you want your content laid out before doing this step. There’s no need to overthink it though, because you’ll see that changing the layout is also brilliantly easy.

Then you can choose your colour scheme. DevHub has really simplified the process by making most of their colour schemes simple and limited. By doing so, the site will always look good and take the burden of designing off of you.

Now that that’s done, you’ll be asked to read and agree to the end user license. It seemed pretty straightforward to me, even though it’s a bunch of legalese. You should read it for yourself and if you have any questions, talk to a legal professional. I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the web.

On to the final editing of your cash cow site. DevHub presents you with a mock-up of how the page will look, but with some AJAX elements to help you tweak it more.

You can change the number of columns. There are only three choices, but really anything more than three columns is just cluttered looking and will lose you readers.

You can drag and drop elements on the page to reposition them. The green shows you where the element will land if you drop it right now.

You can tweak what the module will show. In the Search Keyword field you can add more than one word. I just went with one, for efficiency. In the City or State field, I don’t know if non-North American cities or states show up. Give it a shot, I’m pretty sure they would. This helps you REALLY target your advertising to your specific audience, increasing your chances to make a few bucks.

You can add MORE modules or widgets. Be careful with this! Some people think that if they pepper their site with enough ads, they’ll get clicked more often. Not so. What will happen is your site will die, penniless and alone.

And, finally, the part that really matters, you can add or edit content without knowing a thing about HTML or any programming language. The Content Module has most of the editing features you might find in a word processing program.

Once you’ve got all that set up, you can preview your site to see just what it would look like. Not tooo shabby, eh?

Of course, it would look better if there were some real content in there. However, I think this illustrates pretty well the ability of DevHub to help you build a website that is monetized, looks decent and is free! That’s the trifecta right there, folks.

Naturally, this all begs the question. How much can you make with a DevHub website? Well, I don’t really know. That’s pretty much up to your ability to market the site and drive visitors to it. Then, hopefully, they like what they see and click on a few links and maybe buy some affiliate products. Yes, you could probably make more if you set up your own affiliate and PPC relationships on your own website, but how many of us can make a decent website on our own?

Let’s say you only make about a hundred bucks a month from your site. That’s fairly high for a new site, but it can be done. It’s not that much is it? However DevHub allows you to set up 10 different sites for free. So, if you can get each site to generate about a hundred bucks, that makes for a thousand dollars a month! Not enough to quit your day job or retire, but maybe it helps pay off the house a little quicker or helps you save up for a down payment.

Keep in mind the entire process from start to finish took me less than ten minutes. Instant web presence and not a dime out of pocket. There you have it folks! Don’t thank me, thank DevHub.

Do you have any experience using DevHub? Are there other apps out there like this (or better) that give you free website and lets you monetize it? How’s your monetizing process been going? Drop us a line below.

Creating Your Own Website For Free with BlueVoda

Dean Sherwin — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:01:16 +0000

Paying someone to design you a basic site is now almost completely unnecessary. Say for example you own a small business or would like an online bio or website to showcase you or your talents. The best way to do it without creating another generic blog is to build your own individual website from scratch.

Many people are put off by this because HTML is a mystery and the prospect of ‘designing’ sends shivers down their spines. However, designing a cool website that is useful and pleasing to the eye need not be such as hard task.

BlueVoda is a free website builder, so easy to use that anyone who has enough computing skills to make a FaceBook page and use MS Paint, can use it for creating your own website for free. All it is, is resizing boxes, entering text, choosing colors and putting in some pictures and fancy buttons – simple stuff.

First, you’ll obviously have to get the software. It’s 100% free and is available for download right here. When you go to this page you will be asked for your name and e-mail. Once you have entered in all of this information about yourself you can begin the download by checking your e-mail and following the link provided.

An activation key will be e-mailed to you, which you will need to use the software. When the download has finished open the program for the first time. You will be prompted to enter in the activation key that BlueVoda e-mailed to you. Once you have done this the program should start up and ask you whether you want to open an existing or new page. Click “˜new‘.

Along the top and down the left hand side you’ll see tons of icons which can be daunting at first. It’s best to break these up to better understand them.

On top, we have all of our basic web editing tools. Text entry, insert image, change font, create buttons and PayPal links (such as Donate, Buy etc). All of these are resizable and can be placed anywhere on the page.

So for example if I click the text entry icon a small box will appear on the page. I can move this around by clicking and holding on it and moving the mouse. I can resize it by dragging one of the blue boxes around its edge just as you would in MS Paint, right? This technique can be applied to every feature you put on the page be it a picture, game, button, video or banner.

Down along the left hand side you’ll see the more flashy stuff such as Windows Media Player, Quicktime, Flash Player, your RSS feed button and advertisement banners. Place one of them on the page and resize as needed. Then, to put content in it (eg. a video) double click the box and press the ‘Browse‘ button to locate the file on your PC.

So you know exactly how big all of these features are going to be, there are two measurement scales along the side with moving markers in sync with your mouse. To get a real feel for how things will look later, you can preview your site in your browser. Simply click “˜File‘ and then “˜Preview in Browser‘. This will launch your default browser with your site displayed as it would be on the web.

Chances are your site will have more than one page and to make it easier to edit and cross-check, you can have multiple tabs open at once. You can also create a basic page with only the headings and menu bar to use as a template for every page of the website. To do this, create the basic look of the site and click ‘File‘. Then click ‘Save as Template‘.

To change the basic properties of your page, right click on the background and click “˜Page Properties‘. From here a window will open with tabs such as “˜Background‘ and “˜Scroll Bars‘. You can change colors, add a picture as the background and make fancy scroll bars and page transitions.

The options and features in this program are all really well laid out. When you have finished your website, there are two things you have to do to get it live on the net.

Go to your webhost and upload all the images, videos and other files you used without changing their file name (this is important otherwise the site won’t know how to find them).
Then, click “˜View‘ in BlueVoda and select “˜Page HTML‘. When the HTML code is up on your screen, copy all of it and then paste it into your host’s HTML editor. This page will now be online.

Repeat this process for all the pages of the website.

TIP: For the best compatibility with BlueVoda you can use VodaHost (this is where they make their money), but it works just as well with free hosting companies such as FreeWebs so long as you choose the “˜Advanced‘ website editor (this will allow you to upload the HTML).

The site below took me ten minutes to build:

Imagine what you could do in a few hours or days.

Wendy has also covered 2 other services for creating your own website for free, or maybe a disposable webpage is your thing?

5 HTML Tips to Create a Fast Loading Free Website

Guy McDowell — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 10:05:46 +0000

My HyperText Markup Language (HTML) skills are rusty for certain, but perhaps that qualifies me for this article. Back in the day when Friends was still on TV and AOL was sending out free coasters and mini-frisbees daily, I was creating websites to load on dial-up modems. As time went on, I had the nerve to think that there are plenty of people still out there with non-broadband (dial-up) connections and continued to design web sites based on that.

Finally, I gave up web design and development when quality of content started to get pushed to the side by quantity of content. Flash sites, lots of images, pop-ups, pop-unders, sliders, etc. Trust your quality content and you don’t need this fluff. Trust your content and you can make your website blazingly fast.

With a website that is hosted on a free service, faster is definitely better. Why? Because ‘free’ tends to attract a lot of people and the server has to dish out your page plus thousands of other peoples’ pages that aren’t optimized. It’s like trying to pass a convoy of Kenworths pullin’ logs with your Jimmy haulin’ hogs. But if you have a small Porsche, that gets a lot easier to do.

Here are some tips to trim the fat, in no particular order.

1. Use Tables Sparingly

Tables are a catch-22. In the beginning, they were used to lay out design as well as put content into table format. As the design layouts got more complex, the tables got bigger and nested deeper, and that always means a slow down on load time.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) came along and really helped the problem of using tables for layout. Unfortunately, the browser makers couldn’t seem to wrap their heads around the idea of standards – and still can’t. What looked great in CSS in Firefox looked like a dog’s breakfast in IE and possibly didn’t even render in Safari. Don’t get me started on IE5 on a Mac. I’m still in therapy over that.

Please only use tables to layout content that must be in a tabular format – like a price list or hockey stats. That reduces the number of tables, and depth of nesting, which means speedier load times. Learning CSS will make a big difference, if you must have a fancy layout.

2. Use HTML to Create Colour

Yep, I’m Canadian, so it is colour with a ‘u’ to me. I know HTML is America-centric so the attribute is ‘color’. Learn your hexidecimal color codes and use them to to liven up content instead of images.

Try adding the color attribute to your HTML elements to spice it up. This works especially well in tables, or the body tag, like such:

If you were a browser, would you be faster at loading a simple 7 characters of #FF00FF or a 10×10 pixel image of the colour fuschia a few thousand times? That’s a rhetorical question, you in the back row. Put your hand down.

3. Link To Scripts/Style Sheets

If you use a certain JavaScript (JS) or CSS repeatedly throughout your website, think about creating their own file and calling it, instead of putting it on every page. Since a browser tends to cache a file and call that file first before checking with the server, your browser will already have that script or CSS ready to use. That means less HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) calls which means a faster loading page.

How to Call an External JavaScript:

–>

Why did I put those comment tags around the call for the JavaScript? Because not every browser is set to read scripts. Adding the comment tags makes the browsers with scripting disabled just skip over it, instead of giving annoying error messages.

How to Call an External Cascading Style Sheet:

It’s that simple. The attribute href is where you set the location of your style sheet. The rest of the attributes tell the browser what that file is, so it knows what to do with it.

Some developers may use the @import method to call a stylesheet. In Internet Explorer, this is like having your tag at the bottom of your file, causing it to load the whole page and THEN render the styles on it. Not good.

4. Combine Your Commonly Used Scripts in One File

Many web developers will use the same scripts over and over again. Perhaps there’s a clock script and a calendar script and maybe some sort of special effect script that they’ll use on every page. Instead of having 3 separate files, with 3 separate HTTP calls, put the scripts in one file and call it once. That cuts your HTTP calls by 66% and it gets cached as well. You speed demon, you! Before you raise your hand again, yes, you can do the same thing with CSS files.

5. Do Not Use HTML to Change the Size of Your Images

If you want to use an image that is 1000×1000 pixels on your web page, but you want it to be only 250×250 pixels, change it in an image editor. Some people will ‘shrink’ the image using HTML like such:

If that 1000×1000 pixel image is 2 MB in file size, resizing it with HTML doesn’t make the file size any smaller! In fact it may take longer to load, because now the browser has to put 10 pounds of poop in a 2 pound bag, so to speak. Not an easy task.

Hopefully these tips will help you. Give me a shoutback in the comments if you use them or have some other HTML optimizing ideas to share.