There are several ways that you can build your own websites for free. The term “free” should be considered very carefully however. If you want a way to build a website that only ever displays the information you want to display, then unfortunately, your options drop to almost zero. If you further extend your demands and want a free website where you are always in complete control, and have the last say on what gets published, then your options fall to zero.
The price you often pay for the impression of building your own websites for free is that they will generally have advertisements all over them. In some cases you will earn no income at all yourself from these ads. In most cases you will earn a modest proportion of the earnings, and in other cases you might have to jump through several hoops in order to get a decent cut of the advertising revenue. But in all these cases, you do not have any say in whether the ads get displayed or not, and often you will find ads appearing on one of your pages which completely contradict the message you were trying to communicate in your article.
It is also very common for the so-called “free” platforms to impose huge lists of “Terms and Conditions” or “Terms of Service” on their publishers, and any infringements could lead to your account being suspended or could even result in the deletion of all your hard work. The lesson here is: always keep local saved copies of your online work. Backup your stuff regularly.
Some of the free providers will have a provision where you can pay for a “premium” membership in order to keep ads off your pages, but if you are going to pay money to somebody, why not just opt to buy web hosting yourself, and get a domain name so you can start a proper, personalized site of your own? It doesn’t cost a lot these days, probably less than $10 a month plus an annual registration fee for domain name registration. Then, if you want ads on your site, you get to choose which ones, and you also get 100% of the revenue, rather than sharing the income with an invisible partner. You also have the option of selling the website at a later point in time if you wish.
So it sounds great to be able to build your own websites for free, but like with many offers you will come across in the real world, there really isn’t very much in life that’s free, with no strings attached. My advice is to spend a little to keep control of your own sites.
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