Take the Plunge to a Cool, New DIY Web Site

It’s stylish. It’s multimedia. It’s user friendly and do-it-yourself. The next-generation DIY Web site is ready for prime time. I know of whence I speak because I just designed one for myself. Oh, and the design and basic posting are totally free.

My fellow writers, artists, philatelists, dog walkers, neurologists, garden gnome collectors ― everyone! ― this is a perk you should take advantage of immediately. No more shelling out for a Web designer. No more dependence on technical people to post the code. No more complex tools or HTML knowledge required.

A Great Leap Forward (not involving Mao Zedong)

I remember being at a conference in San Jose in 1993 when the room was abuzz with talk about Mosaic, the first Web browser. People were gushing about it in hushed tones, as if it was the Ten Commandments being delivered unto us from on high.

Early Web sites, however, were clunky, boxy, static affairs with ugly graphics. Today they seem as antiquated as my Kaypro II microcomputer with 64K of memory and dot matrix printer. Yet we fell in love with the Web. No matter that we had to plug the phone cord into our computers to log on. There were new electronic worlds to visit!

In the late 1990s, hosting companies like GeoCities offered build-your-own-Web site tools that were complex and primitive by today’s standards. So most of us hired Web designers to create and deploy our Web sites.

But now the drag-and-drop, template-oriented design of very cool, sophisticated Web sites is here. Having an artistic sensibility is definitely a plus. But the easy-to-use wealth of tools, templates, visuals, fonts, and other elements available with these sites help you get it right.

Where to go for Your DIY Web Site

A bunch of companies are offering DIY Web sites ― eHost, Strikingly, Weebly, iPage, Duda, etc. The freemium business model appears to be similar to that of Dropbox. There’s no charge for building your Web site and posting it. Revenues are derived from premium upgrades (e.g., connecting the site to your own domain, removing ads, adding e-commerce features and more data storage).

I used Wix.com (after hearing repeated ads on NPR podcasts) and it was a really fun experience. After you “publish” your site with a click, you can go back and tweak it any time you want. Linking samples to my Dropbox was easy. I could even link podcast files and videos. The company was founded in 2006 and now claims to have 85 million users, with 45,000 people signing up every day.

So if you’ve been thinking about changing your Web site, stop worrying about the cost. Check out the array of DIY Web site companies and re-introduce yourself to the world.

Gene Knauer is the author of “Herding Goldfish: The Professional Content Marketing Writer in an Age of Digital Media and Short Attention Spans.”