Help! Need a website and have no clue.

[bigbeautifulmonster]

I'm so naive.

Am I correct in that there is no such thing as a free website?

I've had a look at GoDaddy and they have a 99p first year (I think!) but I'm struggling to find how much it is after that (I'll get onto it soon... trying to do this with small children and the general juggle of life is tricky!) but I originally thought I could go onto Wordpress or whatever and just make a website.

I don't need anything fancy, just a page with my info about what I do, maybe a pic or two, and contact details is enough so I don't want to pay much. Any recommendations as to where to look? I'm so stingy I don't even want to hire a web designer either, rather try to do this myself.

Weebly or Wix are good for this kind of thing, and can be free.

Also they are drag and drop/what you see is what you get and very easy to use, no prior web design knowledge needed. For a basic website, they are both more than adequate. You can pay for extra features such as your own domain, but you can also just stay on the free plan.

You can easily do it on wordpress. If you do the free version the URL won't be that great because it'll be on their DNS. Costs about £50 a year to get it with your own URL and you can also pay for nicer/easier editing templates, but the standard ones are ok too.

Oh and avoid GoDaddy, they are v expensive after they reel you in with their cheap deals, and my website used to have a lot of downtime with them. And it was a pain to leave.

Thank you so much for your replies so fast!!!
Ah that's interesting to hear about godaddy.
What's DNS?
Is "URL" the same as a "domain"? Sorry I'm totally clueless and not good with the lingo.

Oh and if I get a freebie am I still searchable on Google etc? I'm basically looking to put my services on a noticeboard (ie. the internet!).

Can only speak for Weebly, but yes you'll appear in search engines, etc. If you don't pay for your own domain (eg. to get a custom URL like www.bigbeautifulmonster.com) then you'll get something like bigbeautifulmonster.weebly.com instead. If you're just starting out or it's a side hustle then that's fine. If you want to develop into a professional business, I think a custom URL always looks a bit better. But you can get that further down the line if things work out.

Also squarespace, really nice looking website templates - you can set one up and play around.

There won't be anything "free" as you need to pay for hosting for any website. Which so essentially paying for the space on the server that your website lives on.

If you look here, you can see the different packages as an example:

www.weebly.com/uk/pricing#plans/type/free

For Weebly, you can buy your domain name through them or use a third party one down the line if you wanted to do that. I imagine Wix is the same.

If you're just starting out is this something you could start off with a Facebook business page?
You could get things running, invite people to like and get attention.
Once you have a website (I used 123 something and then linked my Squarespace page to that) it can be a bugger to get actual traffic to it.
You could pay someone to set it up. But it'll be a few hundred.