Free Website
Are you one of the suckers who have fallen for the free website offer only to discover that it is not only not free but also rather expensive plus you are having to do everything yourself?
You might think that you are unable to afford a professionally crafted website and that you will be saving money by not paying to host the website but you are wrong.
Unless you are fresh out of diapers and naively believe that “Free” really means you pay nothing, you will have realised by now that anything free has to be paid for somehow. After all, have you ever come across a situation where expensive computer servers with mirrored hard drives, housed in air conditioned, rented buildings with a stable electricity and backup supply, high speed internet connections, data allocation and state of the art security are offered free? Do companies really bend over backwards and spend massive amounts of money on online advertising just so they can do you a huge favour by hosting your website for free?
No, you will pay, and in more ways than you can imagine. You will slowly discover that all these services follow one or a combination of revenue models. Have you even noticed that you need to be really persistent to even find the hidden pricing tab on their website? The mere fact that they deem it necessary to hide their pricing should be a warning sign.
Firstly you will be suckered into signing up for the so called free, less than basic service. You spend days or weeks uploading your text and pictures onto their propriety web publishing systems which you can never export in any usable format, making moving your content practically impossible.
It soon dawns on you that some of these services actually sell competing ads around your free website content, then no matter how well qualified you are or how well respected your reputation in the industry, you begin to understand that your customers see your www.YourCompany.MyFreeWebsite.com as just another flyby night service with a free subdomain to be wary of. So you decide to upgrade to their domain package and BINGO, they have you, hook, line and sinker.
You are now all to aware of the fact that you are being fleeced, but it is too late, you have already expended so much of your time and effort into getting your site to look half decent that the mere thought of moving away and starting again is unthinkable and you grudgingly pay the ever increasing US Dollar amount, plus monthly credit card transaction charges, plus exchange rate charges and this happens every month. This is exactly what these free website companies have banked on. They have done their homework. Have you?
Another reason to avoid these so called free websites is that they are often slow to load, meaning that Google, Yahoo and Bing will punish your site on their search results pages due to your website’s slow speed.
Finally, as you become a more sophisticated online marketer, you realise that performing even basic Search Engine Optimisation (a process of systematically improving your website’s performance on Google, Yahoo and Bing) on your free website is a royal pain, resulting in your competitors who have dedicated domains always having the upper hand.
Hopeful you will by now have realised that there is a whole lot more to deploying a website than just having an online presence on a free website platform. You can avoid the pitfalls and opt for a professionally designed and hosted website for your business.
Malachite Digital’s Web Design Service offers a range of cost effective web design packages to suit the South African consumer.