The web is a great leveller. And setting up your own website — for free — is easy and can help reach out to friends, acquaintances and business prospects. All that building your own website requires is patience. Filling it with content and giving it shape is not daunting. Mukesh Maurya, who runs iExtended, a firm that builds and manages websites, says the first step to get a domain name and a host. “The former is the name of the website. In other words, it’s the URL of a website. Currently, no free service offers users a proper domain name such as www.xyz.com, but there are several that offer sub-domains such as www.xyz.domain.com,” says Maurya.

STARTING UP
First off, it’s just fine to have a sub-domain rather than a domain proper. Once a user is comfortable setting up and managing a website, it’s easy enough to switch to a paid service.
“Domain names are quite cheap. You can have a .com domain for around Rs 500 per annum. Website names that use .net or .org or any other top domains are even cheaper,” says Maurya.
    Usually, websites that provide free sub-domains also allow users to host their websites for free. To do this, one has to first upload the content of your website onto a computer, or in other words, a web server that runs 24X7.
    “Free services are somewhat feature-limited but for beginners, they are perfect. Usually, you will get 1GB per month bandwidth and 250MB disk space. This is fine if you are planning a website through which you can keep
in touch with family and friends or share photographs or files. Even for websites that have better traffic but which are mostly text-based, such as those dealing with news and analysis, the bandwidth requirement is not much,’’ explains Maurya.
    However, if a user gets the host and domain from a professional firm, the average, low-traffic website costs about Rs 1,500 per annum, he says. “You also get a set of fairly easy-to-use tools with which you can maintain your website. Even free hosts provide some Linux or web-based tools through which a web server can be managed. But the functionality is somewhat limited,’’ says Maurya.

MAINTAINING IT
Soumya Prasad, a Delhi-based web designer, says familiarity with basic programs like Frontpage is imperative in order to maintain your website successfully.
“Though Frontpage has been replaced by SharePoint by Microsoft, it continues to be one of the most basic and easy programs to design a website. It’s a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. WYSIWYG editors are a great help for beginners,” says Prasad.
    When e-commerce took off, earlier this decade, Google and several other search engines pioneered the concept of contextual advertisement. This means even the ordinary website can be a way to earn money. “While it’s not easy to earn enough money to survive from a website, given the reach of Google and Bing which rely on the websites of others to make money from advertisements, it is possible,’’ says Ajay Dutta, who started www.techenclave.com, a tech forum in 2005.
    Dutta’s advice to anyone planning to set up their own website — and earn ad revenue — is as follows: “It’s important to pick the right kind o f content if you want to make money. Health and finance are two subjects that bring in a lot of ad revenue.”
    But money should be the secondary focus, he cautions.
    “Concentrate first on the content. Build your website around the subject you are passionate about because if you want a slice of the ad pie, you will have to frequently update you website with quality content.”

STEP BY STEP
Register with a website offering free sub-domain and hosting. For example, www.x10hosting.com 
Supply email and other details during registration
Download and install a WYSIWYG editor like Kompozer
Design your website’s front page using Kompozer. It’s easy and requires you to key in the content, select colours, font size, etc. Save file as Index.html
Upload it to www.X10hosting.com