Creating Your Home on the Internet

These days it's important for anyone in business to have a presence on the web ... it's the cheapest and easiest form of advertising you can get. For a service that's entirely web-based like 100kGarages, though, it's not only a requirement to participate but also the only way that prospective Makers can find out about your business and what kind of work you do.

Although you may eventually decide to hire someone to create your website, you'll still need to be actively involved in the content and "look and feel", to make sure that your site reflects your business and the kind of work that you do. So you might want to start by creating a site yourself. And your website doesn't have to be complicated or just the way you want it in the beginning ... here's a simple example website created using the free Google Sites that was created in less than 1/2 hour.

Commercial WebHosting Services:

There are literally hundreds of paid hosting services that offer not only space on their server for your website, but also tools to help you create your website. There may be a local ISP near you that offers web hosting, and a Google search will turn up a lot.

One popular service is Homestead, created by Intuit (the Quicken folks). Along with web hosting and tools to create your website, Homestead can help you create an online store and also offers professional web design services. GoDaddy and 1and1 are two other services offer low-cost web hosting services, with tools for creating your website and inexpensive domain registration and monthly fees.

Google is your friend ... using Google Sites:

Creating a website doesn't have to cost you anything (except time of course), and Google "Sites" is a free website creation and hosting service that's available to anyone that has a free Google account. If you don't already have a Google account you can easily get one by signing up for their free Gmail email service. The process is simple, but sometimes finding an available user name can be tricky so you may have to spend some time finding just the right one ... just be patient and you'll eventually find one that will work for you. This video will help walk you through the steps of creating and setting up a Gmail account.

Once you've created your Google account you're ready to start creating your Google Site. Before you start it will help if you think about the kind of things that you want to include in your website. Here are some possibilities:

Information about your business, including a history (people like pictures)
Location and contact information
LOTS of pictures of work you've done
Information on any Digital Fabrication specialty you have
A description of any projects that you're working on that may interest people in coming back to see how the project is progressing
Any special hints you want to personally give Makers about providing you files or drawings

Google Sites is pretty simple to use and Google offers lots of information in the help menu and some video tutorials on youTube, but we've also found this set of short videos from Radford University in Virginia to be helpful in getting started:

NEXT: If you want to take it a little further, here are some advanced web features to ponder.