Homeowner · Carrollton , AL · Member since 2008 · 138 posts · 11 votes
17y
I was kind of surprised to see that prior to Peter's comment there was very little information posted here with relation to Content Management Systems (CMSs).
A CMS would be a great alternative for you if you want to create a website without wanting to learn any coding languages. As stated by Peter, an excellent resource to get started is WordPress. If you are willing to install it on your own using the instructions that anyone could pretty much follow, you can start creating a great looking website in no time at all.
Then again, if you want to create a membership website or something much larger-scale, you might want to take a look at Joomla (www.joomla.org) or Drupal (www.drupal.org). Both are amazing CMSs and have been designed for building large-scale sites. In fact, a lot of large-scale corporations use platforms like Joomla and Drupal.
Best of all, they are both free and come with great communities. If you are just willing to take the time to learn how they work (again, no knowledge of coding languages are required), you could create your own professional looking site.
Wholesaler · Orlando, FL · Member since 2008 · 111 posts · 251 votes
17y
I think GoDaddy is the best place. You can get a 5 page web site for FREE (for one year) if you buy the domain name there. It is only $5.95 per month I think if you do not want advertisements. They only put advertisements for themselves on the two I have so I do not mind this. It is called their Web Site Tonight, and is very, very easy to build. It is all what you see is what you get. ( but you can add html, that you steal off other sites, don't steal the words, just the formatting. You can do this by right clicking on a web page and then hitting "View Page Source").
This will also show you what your competitors are using for their keywords and tags.
Make sure you concentrate on key words, Title and Description when building your web site. You can check out an example of one I built there at http://www.sellsanantoniohomefast.com. It is very simplistic but very effective.
Make sure you register your domain for at least 6 years, because the search engines give more juice for this.
I believe a regular web site is paramount if you are doing marketing to probate, foreclosures or out of town owners. A blog is great for traffic, but I would not point marketing efforts there.
I get over 60% of my business from the internet, however the number of leads is going down lately. I think because people are canceling web access.
Just a cool note. I bought a house last year from a guy who went to my web site at the library, wrote down all the questions I asked on my form, went home and wrote me a letter. I bought a house that appraised for 182 for 65K.
That will pay for every web site I have for a long time.