Creating Your Own Author Website on a Budget: Options for low-cost websites

A few terms that I’ll be using:

• Website – For most web surfers, a website is a place you visit on the web. But at its technical heart, a website is a collection of files placed somewhere on a computer connected to the web that tells your browser what information to present to the person who visits and how to format it.
• Domain name – You can think of a domain name as an internet address, like a post office box.  When you type a domain like www.kmccullough.com or www.amazon.com into your browser window, it sends that information to a place on the internet that looks up where to find the files for the site that matches that name, goes and gets them and sends them back to your browser.
• Registrar – a company that lets you buy (for a specified term) the right to control a particular domain name. Controlling it means that you can tell the registrar where you want that name to go when someone sends a request for it.
• Hosting – A hosting site is a place where you park those files that make up your site. It may be at a free hosting service like Blogger or Weebly or it may be a service where you rent space and can do whatever you want with it.  Host services vary a lot in quality. A couple of very good ones that I recommend are Hostgator.com, Bluehost.com, Dreamhost.com, and InMotion.com

Options for low-cost websites

Options for low-cost websites:

• Blog sites like Blogger and Wordpress.com
• Free sites at places like Weebly.com
• Site builders at low cost hosting sites
• Using HTML design software to create your own site at an inexpensive hosting sites.
• Use hosted Wordpress at your hosting service.