Cognoscis

Website making is really a craze nowadays. And free website is a bigger craze amongst teenagers. Having a successful site is now a status symbol and every geek wants to do it. But the question is how? Can you make a decent website that stands out for free? Yes you can. Let’s get started.

Plan your Content

First you need to plan what’s your site is going to be about. Now I think that making a personal and random site with no topic orientation is useless. Your site needs to be on a certain topic. It may be small, it may be huge. Don’t think only popular topics will be a hit. The less popular the topic is, the more chance of YOUR making it popular . Choose a nice name, not like “Your name’s site” or something personal.

Designing a site

There are many ways to design a site. You can use Microsoft Frontpage or Dreamweaver. To know how to build a site on Microsoft Frontpage, see the tutorial on the Microsoft site here. There are many other similar tutorials available online. But if you don’t have them, you will have to buy them. Alternately, you can use Yahoo! SiteBuilder. It’s free but I am not fond of using it. So here are the best sites I know to help you create your site easily in a few steps online.

1. NING- Create a social network for your community and friends.
2. YOLA- Easy to use online site builder with different modules and settings.
3. WEEBLY- Best online site creator I have used. Customizable and user friendly.

Some random tips

Explore the options of all three sited. Choose the one you like. Be sure to make it as extensive yet light as possible. If it becomes too heavy in size, it will take time to load and visitors will get irritated. Always use video sharing sites like Youtube and Metacafe to upload and share your videos so that you don’t have to sacrifice your own space on the server. Keep tutorials (video if possible), and make it complete with images and borders. It should catch eyes at the first chance. And remember to check if any of your link is broken or invalid. Most important is the quality of content.

Do you know any other good site builders? Please let us know. In the coming Webmasters post, we tell you about widgets, hosts, publishing, and other related stuff.

Recently I have taken up learning online imaging. So you would be seeing some posts on that. I think everyone must be familiar with South Park cartoon. It’s a very hilarious cartoon in which 4 kids are shown stuck in between all the politics and trends of America. The Animation is all 2-D, but who cares. It’s AWESOME. If you live in India, try to catch it on Vh1 Channel (A part of MTV).  Even if you didn’t see it, use this to create funny characters. It’s fun.

So, intrigued by the different style of South Park characters, I thought to make one of my own. Thus, enter the SOUTH PARK STUDIO. It is a German site. It takes a few seconds to load on your PC. And then you can create create characters in a minute. It has a variety of options of all kinds. Hats, Hairstyles, eyes, skin colour, clothes, and even stuff like pets, musical instruments, shirt motifs, backgrounds, etc.

I started using it. And THAT WAS FUN!!! I made different characters for myself. I even made a group of 15 such characters to tag them as my friends on facebook. There is one small problem though. The “SAVE” option was not working in my case. So I used Printscreen button and pasted it in MS Paint (yeah! I still use it) and then chipped away useless portions.