How do you get your own flashy website without going broke? I have been working on figuring out how to do this for a while. I looked into having someone make a website for me, but they seem to start at about $400 and go up from there. I’m a “starving artist,” I don’t have that kind of money! I wish I had a friend that made websites who could cut me a deal but I don’t know of any such person, unfortunately.
So I braved it alone. First I went with Google Websites. This was great! It was free and very easy to use. This satisfied me for a couple months. While Google Websites is free and easy to use, it is also VERY limited and there were a lot of things I wanted to do with my website that I couldn’t.
I did some more research and asked around. My friend Tim told me about Wix. I checked them out and I have definitely found what I am looking for. I am in no way, shape or form and computer tech person (websites for dummies would be too complicated for me) but I was able to figure it out fairly easily. The whole website operates in flash, so I can do a lot more with it than with Google. The fact that it’s flash is also good if you’re a photographer or an artist, because your pictures can’t be copied. I wanted to link my domain name to it, so while it is free to make the site, you do have to pay to be able to link your domain name to it. I paid $70 for a whole year, very affordable.
They also have the option to upgrade so that you can actually have it be an e-commerce website as well, with a cart and the ability to recieve credit card payments, etc. This is about $15 a month if you pay for a year or 2 at a time. I will be doing this eventually, but I’m not up to that point yet.
I got my domain name from godaddy.com and linked it to my Wix website. Also, I went on-line before purchasing the domain and before upgrading my Wix websites and I found discount codes for both, so I got the Wix upgrade free for a month and my domain name for a year for about $6. Very affordable!
My Wix website for myself as an artist is www.meartist.com (you can see a screenshot of my home page at the top). Another example of a Wix website is www.littleacornsgrow.net so you can see a couple different themes you could use.