We need to put up a website very quickly. Therefore we are looking for a good, reliable free website builder. We will not be looking at it as a source of work or income but simply offering something through it, plus a number of links that are similarly non-profit making. It is for a human rights domain purpose, so design only needs to be practical rather than graphically highly sophisticated. However the biggest issue to consider is that we will be organising quite a large number of video conference presentations and lectures to make publicly available. I suspect that may gobble up lots of space very quickly.
I know this has been asked umpteen times generally. I also know that some of the providers go stale and people find better ones. I have recently killed off a site because it seemed to be down more than people could get into it. This one has got to be reliable as well as offer a good capacity.
wordpress is more versatile if you understand web design, but if like me, you're not able to spend months on design without a doubt, weebly.com is by far the best.
Thanks for the offer. We have given it a try using DropBox. We sent a video as a file to a friend in India. That is what we would do rather than streaming. That would give the people getting the 'lectures' to use more than once, for lectures of their own, as a student resource and so on.
We have along, long way to go. Tomorrow we are trying to finish the actual proposal to send out to our supporters (kind of informal committee) in order to have something to send to the people we want to make the presentations. Although the video we tried with was well over one hour's worth, we are setting a 40 minute limit. That is not just for the file size but for those presenting not to wander off into the wilderness as they sometimes do and to be user friendly at that end. Now it will be time getting the things moving. The website help here has been terrific, now our next practical step there will be deciding how to format the video files to make them accessible.
I believe the latest release of Wordpress has video capabilities.
Bear in mind that you would need to pay for over 2GB storage with Dropbox. So you would be better off factoring that in to the hosting. The basic OVH web has 100Gb for 2 euros per month. Next level at 5 euros is 250 Gb. Dropbox is $10 for 100GB.
Sounds like a plan, you won't be able to stream with dropbox though, I can host video for you if you want, you can then embed it on your own site if that helps.
Thanks everybody. Between you it is a LOT of help. I just had yesterday in hospital but OH and I took a laptop and worked on what we want to do despite me being attached to a couple of machines. Wordpress and Weebley look good. Wix is what I have just dumped. They were good but seem to be running out of steam.
We had advice from somebody else who is suggesting we create an archive on a dedicated hard disk, find out which format would be universally best for users, probably more than one so doubling or trebling our storage requirements but then put a 'catalogue' on the site with a bit of detail such as date of recording and a sentence about the content then use DropBox to give the people what they want. Again it is a free service. So then we'll be doing it all as cost free as possible, giving it out free and achieving what the person who began this set out to do before she popped her clogs.
I see, why not? If you want to host your own video you're going to need more than a free web host I'm afraid. Dependant on how much traffic you are expecting of course. A dedicated free video serving platform is a good option if you can find one that will serve your requirements.
Thanks Kerry but it would not be a single 'conference' at one time but may well grow over time anyway. So that the blogs, I have been part of several conferences myself and done training by the same method, don't quite hit the nail square on.
We need to store them on an external hard disk here. YouTube does not actually work everywhere, for instance people in Pakistan could not see the vids.
Just use a free Wordpress blog and place all the video's on Youtube where you'll have unlimited space.
The design of the standard WP templates is often quite classy and you can choose from many different lay-out options. The WP platform is very reliable. You'll just have to accept that they might use your site for some rather inobtrusive advertising. See for instance my non-profit site www.de-tournus.com and the links to the different free sites on this platform.
I spent months researching free website buiilders but didn't go for any of them, they all seem to have limitations in one form or another, although I was looking for something that would enable me to build quite complex sites and more than one of them. Be careful with free hosting/website builders, they are generally very limited when it comes to search engine optimisation, most of them won't let you do your own so you have to pay for their services. One of my clients asked me to optimise her site but it wasn't possible with her 'free' hosting, even worse when we looked into moving her site so it could be optimised that wasn't possible either because the site was based on the hosting companies own template which they retain the legal rights to. Remember the old adage 'you get what you pay for'.
I agree with Nikki, very flexible with loads of support, plugins and widgets that can be used to customise it however you want. To use it as a website you simply create pages rather than posts and select a theme that support menus so you can navigate to the pages.
Also has a wysiwyg interface to make creating pages and publishing them very easy for either multiple users or on an individual basis.
You can go to wordpress.org for support on own domain versions or you can use wordpress.com for a free hosting version.
Once you have learned how to use Wordpress you will never really need to use anything else.
Hi. I can't remember if weebly or wix were the #1 out of the top ten. Sure one of them were. Recently I plumped for Jimdo which was #2. Really easy to use & supports You tube vids & has 'widgets' galore . Had course to need a bit od 'customer support' and they were brill, very quick and had the answer! You always have the option to upgrade from 'free' too.
I have used 'webs' before. That is easy too, but customer support was not great.
Fasthosts, I 'helped' a friend out and I found it awkward and with virtually zilch support.
One thing with them all, is Optimisation is limited.... a lot of the backround stuff will 'point' the robots back to their own site. But, hey you can't blame them for that!
have you tried using WIX or moonfruit these are free web builder tools and i have found them great in building my own site, very simple and easy to use ! good luck hope this helps
Brian, a while back when I was looking at some options for myself I was impressed with Weebly as it looked quite easy to use (drag and drop) with good templates: http://www.weebly.com/#home
There are heaps of people offering free web-hosting out there - you just have to figure out which one is easy for you to use, which one offers you the best storage space for free or cheap, and which ones allow you to use a good name (you might have to compromise with their 'tag' on your name though).
Here's another I just found which looks good too: www.wix.com
and this comparison (yes, it's for paid sites, but you can still read the pointers for free) is great for figuring out what to look for in a hosting site: comparisons