Create Your Own Website – Part II – Free company logos, free web site templates, and free flash templates!

Posted on March 14, 2007 at 8:16 am

Make sure to read other posts from the How to Build Your Own Web Site series!

How to Make/Build/Create Your Own Website – Part I – Get a domain name and get web hosting
How to Make/Build/Create Your Own Website – Part II – Free company logos, free web site templates, and free flash templates!

Ok, now on to Part II of this segment on how to make your own web site! Now that you have your own domain name and hosting, you’re going to need to actually make the web site! That usually scares most people because they think of code and HTML and all that fun stuff. And yes, back a couple of years ago, you really did need to know it. But not anymore! Now you can get very nice web site templates (the web page designed without any content) easily!

There are some great sites on the web that are giving away web site templates for free! I’ve used them myself for my own web sites, so there really is no catch. Also, if you want a really nice web site, you can search through hundreds of web site templates that all range from $45 to $60. So why pay someone $500 to $2000 to get a web site done (and have all the restrictions too), when you can do it yourself! It takes a little time to learn, but you don’t have to know any HTML because the site is already created. All you have to do is put your content into the template.

Here’s the site I like most and have brought many of my templates from:

http://www.templatesbox.com/templates.htm

At the top, click Free Templates and you’ll see that they have a very large collection of high quality free templates. You can download these onto your computer and edit them in a HTML editor. We’ll talk more about how to do that later.

You’ll also notice that the site has Free Flash Templates, Free Logo Templates, Free Newsletter Templates, etc. Go ahead and browse through these and you might find like I did that getting a logo, website and making flyers for my business could all be done from here and for free!!! Talk about great! And if you don’t like any of the free ones, you can browse through the premium templates that are very very reasonably priced considering how well the sites look and feel.

Here’s another site that has templates premium and free templates (the free ones are in the top right box):

http://freesitetemplates.com/

So whether you are starting a gardening business, computer service, restaurant, you’ll find templates made specifically for your field and industry!

Ok, so now you have your free templates, but what do you do with them? Well, you’ll need a HTML web page editor in order to open the files and put your content in. The most popular ones are Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft Web Expression, but there are some really good ones that are free and will work just fine for our purposes!

http://nvu.com/index.php

Nvu is a complete web authoring tool that rivals Dreamweaver and FrontPage. It has a very professional look and has a lot of features. It’s also a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, so there is little need to look at HTML code.

You can download it here (click the one with the Windows logo):

http://nvu.com/download.php

Now you can open your template and begin placing your text into the pre-made pages. In the next part I’ll explain step by step how to use the web page editor to add your own text and images into the web page.

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