“The door’s open but the ride it ain’t free”
This immortal quote comes from the Bruce Springsteen song Thunder Road. In this case however we are speaking about free or cheap websites that you see offered all over the place. Now as a small business I can understand people wanting to save money, and these free or nearly free sites sound like such a great deal. So easy to set up and at no or minimal cost. Now I don’t want to stand in anybody’s way, but I do feel that you should be aware of a few things before you go down this route. I will then give you an alternative to the free method.
Here are some things to consider:
Code Ownership: Before signing up for one of these sites, make sure you actually own the code after you are done with this company. This is where the fine print comes in. These free sites seem like such a great idea, except for the fact at some point you may outgrow this company and need to have your own server, or you may just get tired of them as the support is not what you need or are expected. The way most of these companies structure their sites, you don’t actually own the code. Now the text and images you add are yours. BUT, and this is a big but: You can’t just take your site and move it to a new server or provider. In defense of these companies, nothing in this world is free. The way they make money is to keep you and by having you sign up for some of their additional services.
Additional Costs: a common tactic of the free or cheap web companies is to give you a site for free but they nickel and dime you with additional costs. For instance if you need search engine optimization, there’s a cost if you need marketing help there’s a cost, in fact when you sign up there are pages of add-ons that cost you money. What started as free ends up being more expensive than a full service provider. I had a client come to me as their free site ended up costing them $400 a month with little support.
Technology: one thing Business owners don’t give enough talk to is the technology platform for their website. Many of these free or cheapo providers use their own proprietary software. As we said before, one drawback is you can’t just take your site and move it. But the other drawback is their product is not as good as some of the open source products on the market. Examples of these are WordPress and Drupal.
Alternatives: as a small business, I understand all the issues that face other business owners. And I also have sought to find alternatives to costly websites. Depending on what a customer needs, we have alternative solutions that can get you to market quickly and inexpensively. And best of all our support plans will keep you up-to-date 24/7/365. If you don’t have the cash to get started, we also work out payment plans to space out the cost of your site. So at the end of the day, you own the code, you have a great content management system, and our support plans give you an all-in-one solution for content, web marketing, social media and pay per click advertising. No nickel and diming, a one-stop solution.
We did a post a while back in which we shared some tools we use on a daily basis to make our lives managing websites easier. We have an updated list and hope you find these time saving/helpful sites as beneficial as we do. Best of all, they are free to use.
1) Embed Responsively – This is a great site for those of you who are embedding video and want to make sure it is responsive. This not only works for YouTube, it embeds all different types of video.
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2) Character Count Online – This easy tool is great for writing tweets. It counts characters including spaces, words, paragraphs and whitespace.
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3) ConvertCase.com – This site saves me time as some clients love the cap lock. This site converts case and has several options.
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4) Text Fixer – This site can do a variety of tasks to help you on a daily basis. It can alphabetize things, put in numerical order, remove dupes and more.
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5) Am I Responsive – This cool little site shows what your site will look like on various devices, from desktops to pads and SmartPhones.
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6) LastPass Password Generator – In today’s world, it is no longer ok to have easy passwords that hackers can figure out. This tool will generate long, safe passwords with a variety of options.
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7) PHP Beautifier – If you code your own PHP or just have a WordPress site that others write code for, one thing is for sure: At some point you or someone else will need to go into the code. Many programmers are great at writing code but do not format their code properly. This makes it hard for those who come afterwards. This tool will beautify your code and make it easier to edit for the next person tasked with editing.
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8) Unsplash – We all at times have to use stock photos. Some sites are so full of overused images, you cringe just looking at them. This site offers 10 free images every 10 days. And they aren’t your typical shots. They are spectacular and can be used for any project. I used one of their images for this post :).
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9) Lorem Ipsum – When we build websites, we don’t always have the text we need to complete the pages. Rather than have blank pages, I prefer to use placeholder text. This tool allows you to generate words, characters, bytes. The text is derived from Latin literature from 45 BC. It is the perfect placeholder as people don’t get caught up reading and commenting on the words.
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10) SSL Analyzer – This tool will tell you if your SSL certificate is valid and also will give you a lot of information about your certificate.
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Have any great time saving sites you’d like to share? Add a comment below.
