How To Create a Free Website

[Guide for Beginners to Earning Money Online – Part 1]

In this article, I’ll explain and show you how to create a free website. I’ll be using the words “blog” and “website” interchangeably because a blog is also a type of website with frequently updated content. To create a website in WordPress, you’ll need to build it first, customize the design theme and then start creating the content.

You can find several options out there to create a blog for free. They all promise to build it in a few easy steps. But what kind of web hosting, training, and support do they offer? Since even a free website has to reside somewhere, the basic and far from the best hosting will be provided. But there is usually no training or support offered for free stuff.

I’m glad that you made it here because here you’ll get a full-scale WordPress website that is powerful, mobile-ready, and hosted on the fast and secure servers using some of the top hosting services in the world. I also advise taking free lessons available for you in the Online Entrepreneurship Course. In addition, you’ll get the support of about a million community members from all around the world.

The process of building a website with the tools you’ll find in this article takes under 30 seconds. It is performed in a few easy steps and is absolutely free. Once your site is built, you’d be able to customize the design and start adding the content as you wish.

Why Would You Want to Create a Blog? 

The main purpose of running a blog is to reach more people, get followers and expand your audience.

But what for? Here are my thoughts:

• To share your passion with others
• To help others resolve their issues and find their answers
• Inspire and encourage others
• Earn money
• To meet like-minded people and exchange knowledge and experiences via comments and other forms of online communication
• Make friends around the world.

Please tell me your reasons for creating a blog
in the Comments field at the bottom of this article. 

Whatever your reasons are for creating a blog, the main purpose of any blog is to reach as many readers as possible. Please keep in mind that people will read your posts only if the content is relevant to their needs and interests, and is engaging. 

Therefore, if you want to create a website strictly to make money or for your own personal benefits such as learning a foreign language or keeping a personal journal, think again. Your visitors need to find something valuable for themselves in order to read your post to the end, browse other pages on your site, and come back again at another time. 

If you are at the beginning stage of learning another language, maybe it’s better to keep your writing in that language private until you are able to communicate your thoughts clearly with your audience. 

Making money should be secondary to helping people resolve their problems, or they won’t be interested in reading, and you won’t get visitors and thus revenue. 

A personal journal can only be interesting to others if they can relate to your life experiences and find encouragement in their own endeavors or solutions for their own struggles.

Define Your Niche And Choose Your Website Name

Niche is your audience – people with similar problems or interests. Before you create your website or blog, you need to know what group of people you’ll be writing for. As controversial as it may sound, the narrower your subject is the bigger audience you’d be able to reach. Remember that you are not the only one in the whole Internet world who is addressing this same audience. You want to win the competition and have more people reading and following your blog rather than blogs of others in the same niche. Therefore, you want to earn the authority and it is easier to do in a narrow niche. 

Once you defined your target audience, think of a name for your website that is short, catchy and relevant to your niche. Try to come up with a name that is no longer than 4 words, but the shorter, the better. 

For instance,

• Work Online Guru
• Cats Care Solutions
• Body And Mind Balance
• Traveling Bicyclist
• Curative Herbs
• Julia’s Jewels

Tip: Even though you are building a free website, you may want to transfer it to your own domain name in the future. I recommend checking whether a domain name matching or closely relevant to your website’s name is available with the most recognized Top Level Domains (TLDs). TLDs are those with domain suffixes (also called domain extensions) .com, .net, or .org. You never know where your blogging will lead you. If you later decide to take your blog to the next level, you may want to purchase your own domain name (under $15.00/ year) because it will gain more authority and get a higher ranking in search engines.  

Check below for free whether a domain name is available for your website name and with what suffix.

Enter your website name in the search field above and click the “Find Keywords” button. Once you fill in a quick registration form: your name, email address, and password, you’ll get information for your searched name in the first row in the search results table and some related phrases in the rows below it for more ideas. If right away you don’t see the available domain suffixes in the last column titled “Domains”, click “Search” or “Find More” link in the corresponding cell.

You may want to tweak your site name to something similar if not all 3 extensions are available. 

This check is not required for your free website but could benefit you in the future. 

Out of the 3 searches in the screenshot above, I would rather choose Jewelia’s Gems – so that if I decide to purchase a domain name later, it’ll be jeweliasgems.com (no spaces or special characters). If by the time I’m ready to buy my domain name, jeweliasgems.com will be already taken, I could still go for jeweliasgems.net or jeweliasgems.org

Are you ready to build your website? Let’s do it!

Create a Website in WordPress for Free.

Click the button below to create a website in WordPress. It will be built on a SiteRubix platform and hosted within Wealthy Affiliate for free for as long as you need it. 

Clicking on the button above will bring you to the page where you’ll be prompted to enter:

• Your desired Domain Name.
  For the Domain Name, you can enter your chosen website name without any spaces or any special characters and without a domain extension. The SiteBuilder will check if your name is available within the SiteRubix platform and notify you if it’s not.
  
  
• Your Website Title
  This would be your actual website name or title with the proper spacing and capitalization.
  
  
• Choose the Theme
  Choose the first one in the offered selection (if there is more than one). The Site Builder needs a theme to build your site, but you will be able to change it once your website is created. For the instructions, refer to the Customizing Your Website Design in WordPress section below

Once these 3 fields are completed, click the “Next” button.

On the next page, you’ll be prompted to register. As you can see in the screenshot, no credit card, physical address or any other personal sensitive information is required to create your free account. Fill in the form and click the “Build My Website Now!” button.

The build process will take only a few seconds. Once your site is created, Kyle, the co-founder of Wealthy Affiliate will greet you and offer a tour around the WA platform. Take it if you have a few extra minutes because it’s very helpful, or skip it.

You’ve created a free Starter account with Wealthy Affiliate and built your first website. My applause to you! This is a wonderful accomplishment and a completed first step to the great success of your online venture.

Bookmark Your Wealthy Affiliate Page –
so, that you can easily return to it and continue working on your website!

The next page will look similar to the screenshot below. To modify your website’s design and start creating the content in WordPress, click the “Login Now” button next to the “admin” username. You don’t need to change or reset your password.

Skip the following section if you’ve successfully built your site following the instructions above and jump to
Accessing Your Wealthy Affiliate Free Starter Account and WordPress Back Office.
Continue reading and watch the video if you had trouble with the first method.

Another way of accomplishing the same results is to create your Free Starter Account first (click the link to register) and then build a free website. When you complete the short registration process providing your Name, Email, Password, and Username, you’ll be brought to your Wealthy Affiliate Profile page.

Bookmark Wealthy Affiliate page –
so, that you can easily return to it and continue working on your website!

Set up your profile by uploading a picture and providing a few words introducing yourself to the Wealthy Affiliate community. This is optional but highly recommended as people will be more willing to give you a hand when you need it and answer your questions.

The video below shows you how to create a blog for free if you already have an account with Wealthy Affiliate. The same information is provided in the text below the video – chose your preferred method of learning! 🙂

On the left-hand side of the screen click the “Websites” menu and select “SiteBuilder” in the pop-up submenu. On the following screen…

Step 1: Select “Free Domain”

Step 2: Choose a domain name for your website. 
The domain name could be your site’s name or something very similar to it without spaces and all in lowercase.

Step 3: Enter your site’s name.
Type in your actual website title with spaces and appropriate capitalization.

Step 4: Click on any design theme to select it.
At this point, don’t spend time deciding which one you like better. It doesn’t matter, because you can change the theme after your blog is built. I’ll show you how to do so.

Step 5: Click “Build my website” button, kick back and wait for a few seconds.

Congratulations! You’ve created your first website.

As I mentioned above, you can now choose a design theme that you’d like to use, customize it and start writing content for your blog.

Accessing Your Wealthy Affiliate Free Starter Account and WordPress Back Office

Let me show you how to access your Wealthy Affiliate (WA) account next time after closing it and how to navigate to your website.

Use your bookmark to return to your WA account and login with the username and password you’ve created while building your website. If you forgot to bookmark this page, go to my sign-up page again, and click the “Login” button in the top right corner of the screen instead of the blue “Sign-up” button or green “Get Started”.

Once you are in the WA environment, in the left-hand side menu under your name and hopefully, the image that you’ve added to your profile, you’ll find the “Websites” link. Click on it, and a submenu will pop-up. Next to the submenu, you’ll see “My Recent Websites” header and your newly created website under it as shown in the screenshot below. Click on the “Login” button under your website’s name, and “Login Now” in the next pop-up.

Another way of locating your website, or when you have more websites than fits in the “My Recent Websites” preview area, is to click on the “SiteManager” submenu item in the first column of the “Websites” pop-up window.

Customizing Your Website Design in WordPress

The following video tutorial shows you how to:

• Access your WA account and WordPress back office
• Customize a WordPress theme
• Change a WordPress theme
• Delete a WordPress theme

Now you are in your WordPress back office.  Let’s take a look around…  

Some rubbish sample content was created for you during the build process. Check out the menu on the left-hand side of the WP Dashboard. Click on “Posts”, and you’ll see a Hello World! post. Click on “Pages”. You should now see a Sample Page and a Privacy Policy page. 

Keep this sample content while choosing the design theme, and feel free to delete it after the theme is selected and you are ready to start writing your own content. 

Having a Privacy Policy page on your website is a legal requirement, but Wealthy Affiliate offers its own template and it’s explained how to customize it for your blog in the free lessons of Online Entrepreneur Certification course under the Training menu on the left-hand side of the screen.

Changing WordPress (WP) Theme.

Find the “Themes” menu under “Appearance” as shown in the image and click on it. Choose a theme you like among pre-installed themes or click “Add new theme” for additional choices. 

Don’t be misled by the images in the theme presentation. They are either not there at all, or serve as the place holders for you to replace with your own pictures appropriate to your niche.

When choosing your theme, your main focus should be on features available for customization rather than how pretty the sample images of the theme look in the preview.

If you decided to add a new theme you’d need to install it first and then activate to make it your current theme. 

You can view your sample content with the new theme by selecting the “Visit Site” link under the Home icon and your site’s name in the top left corner of the screen.

Initial Theme Customization

Now, let’s make initial customization to your chosen theme. You’d be able to customize it further as you create your content.

You can modify sections of your website by either clicking on the pencil icon next to each section, or by selecting an appropriate menu item on the left-hand side as shown in the image above.

1. Site Identity
   Site identity includes
   1. Your website’s title, which is already set for you as it was known when you created the site
   2. Your logo, if you wish to create one and add it to the top
   3. A tagline – completely optional. It could be a short sentence clarifying your title, providing inspiration to your readers, or anything else relevant to your site’s name.

2. Homepage Settings
   If you are creating a blog type website, I recommend setting up the Home page as a blogroll: the text excerpts and featured images of your latest blogs will be displayed. In any content-driven website, the content is the most important aspect, and the sooner the visitors can see the content the higher your chance is that they will stay and browse around your website.
   
   Even if you decide to go for a static Home page, make sure that the navigation is clear and simple. Don’t let beauty come before the convenience. The fewer clicks and scrolls your visitors have to make before they get to the point, the better your site attendance and will be.
   
   Another aspect to remember is that among your site visitors could be people with disabilities. In each country, there are certain regulations to follow when designing a website. In the United States, it’s Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). Basically, use common sense while beautifying your website and remember that there are people who are visually impaired or blind, colorblind, get bothered by flashing lights, are deaf. Do whatever is in your power to make your site accessible to as many people as possible. In my future posts, I’ll touch on some techniques which can be or must be implemented on your website to accommodate special needs.
    
3. Widgets
   Widgets are the small blocks that perform a specific function and always stay on the screen despite the page of your website being viewed.
   
   You can add or remove available widgets from the sidebar; you can design your own widget using existing templates. Using the screenshot above as an example, perhaps, I would remove “Archives” and “Recent Comments” widgets, and add “About Me”, and perhaps, “Social Profile  Icons”, “Affiliate Disclosure” and the most important promotion.

4. Menus
   You can create your menus using this Customization screen, but the most common practice is to work on your menus separately. You can access Menus workspace from your WordPress Dashboard -> Appearance -> Menus.
   
   In the customization screen, you’d choose where on your website you’d like to display which menu. Some themes offer only one location at the top, but you’d still need to choose which menu to display there. Other themes offer multiple locations for different menus. For example, you can display your Primary Menu at the top, and put all legal pages (Privacy Policy, Affiliate Disclosure, Personal Data Access Request and such) in the footer.
   
   

Start Creating the Content

And now the fun begins! You are ready to start writing your posts and creating your pages. 

The starting point is usually customizing and publishing your Privacy Policy page. Then, your first post should be “About Me” or “About Us” introducing yourself or your organization and team. Having an “About Me” page or post helps you to gain more trust and strengthen your credibility.

On the Wealthy Affiliate platform under “Training”, you’ll find the detailed walk-through on how to create your first page and first post in the free phase of the Online Entrepreneur Certification course. 

In the next chapters of the Guide for Beginners to Earning Money Online I’ll explain the difference between posts and pages in more detail, and continue talking about creating the content that ranks well in Google and other search engines.

I hope that this article provides you enough information to start and the free lessons at Wealthy Affiliate will keep you occupied for a week or even longer.

Please use the Comments field below to ask any questions you may have, tell me why you want to create a website, and leave your feedback to my post. Bookmark my website and come back for more information as I publish new posts weekly. 

Share this article on social media you are a part of to help your friends who may also want to know how to create a free website.

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