If you are wanting to drum up business, would recommend steering away from free websites.
I use WordPress for my business. It is historically a blogging platform, but MANY businesses are now using it. Pretty easy to update your site, as well. And the sites don't necessarily look "bloggy." Lots of great widgets you can add on and the themes are highly customizable. Also, WordPress is VERY search-engine friendly. Google loves WP sites. There are also widgets you can set up to automatically "push" things (updates, blogs, etc.) to Facebook, Twitter, etc. It's nifty!
If you want a paid site, you'll need two things:
- Find a place to purchase your domain name (
www.johnsmith.com, for example) - GoDaddy is one of the more popular ones
- Find a place to actually host your website (there are MANY)
Now, you CAN do both parts at one website, but some places are better than others. I had my site through one of these big companies and didn't care for their customer service.
My domain name is hosted through Yahoo!. It's a yearly cost, doesn't cost you much if it's not a high-demand name. I actually host my site through Laughing Squid. This is a small company out of SF highly recommended by WordPress. It's a reliable, no frills company that charges me $6 a month (and I don't have to buy a certain number of months to get that cost). They are not 24/7 like some other services, but it suits me perfectly and I just love the feel of their site.
Once you do those two things, you can set it up on WordPress. There are TONS of free WordPress "themes" (another name for a template) out there, and they actually look very nice. My site is one of the free themes, and I do like it a lot (PM me and I'll tell you the name of the site).
So my total cost per year is roughly close to $100 combined for hosting and the domain.
Hope that all makes sense to you. Please PM me if you need any other details (I'm not looking to drum up business, by the way - not that there's anything wrong with that!)
