I’ve started to play the guitar and sing around town. It’s loads of fun. Friends and acquaintances are were starting to ask me how to tell where and when I would next be performing. The obvious solution was that I needed a website, but I barely know any html, yet I wanted to create a pleasant looking site. And I didn’t want to pay much.  Google’s free website design software looked too rudimentary, and it didn’t allow me to use my own domain. I read some complaints about Go Daddy’s website building service, and thus shied away, though it might be fine for a static site like the one I wanted.  [Note:  I do much of the website admin work at DI, which uses a WordPress platform, which is terrific, but doesn’t really fit my needs for my personal site].

There are various other companies out there offering free or cheap websites. I looked at some of these, but not many, so don’t take this as any sort of deeply knowledgeable survey. I ended up choosing Intuit’s Homestead program, and I’m happy with it.  Homestead offers various packages, but I only needed the basic level. I will be paying less than $150 for two years, which gets me a access to Homestead’s easy-to-use website-building program, up to five pages, 25 MB of storage and 5 GB/month of bandwidth. This price (which ends up being about $6/month) also provides me with a domain (I picked erichvieth.net — I already owned erichvieth.com ) and the option of a blog. They have other packages too. As you might expect, they will urge you to buy their more expensive packages, which have more bells and whistles.  Homestead’s base price includes unlimited live and knowledgeable phone assistance.  For instance, they walked me through the process of linking the domain I already owned with my new website.  I took advantage of Homestead’s live help several times while building my site; pleasant people tutored me on how to do some of a few other things that were not quite obvious (until I did them once). You can train up on this software in an hour. The design-making software is so well considered that it is hard to get things wrong while making your new site.  Once you put together one site, you’ll be tempted to help family and friends slap together their new sites.

Within a few hours, I had put together my own personal website, which gets the job done quite well (though I’m still tweaking it).  I used two of the pages to provide information about my music.  Since I had the right to create five pages, I used the other three to provide information about my photography, writing (I’m an avid blogger . . . ) and a general bio.

I’m posting on the way I built my new site in case anyone reading this is in the same position as I was, looking for a good combination of low cost website, relatively low-volume bandwidth, and easy to design. If anyone else is happy with any comparable service, feel free to mention it in the comments. Remember the parameters: low cost and design-it-yourself website building for people who don’t know any html.