Canada Get Your Business Online

Canada Get Your Business Online offers free Yola websites to anyone who wants one, using the .ca extension. This is a new program as of fall 2010, sponsored by Google, the Royal Bank, CIRA, Rogers, the Chamber of Commerce, the Globe and Mail, Yola, and SLAP, all of whom benefit by having more people online. Their mission is “Help all Canadian businesses get online and be successful.” They offer one year of free hosting, resources, advice, free templates, and a step-by-step process that quickly steps you through from start to finish.

The toolset comes from Yola, a Delaware company based in California. It’s still in Beta, which means that there is a risk of bugs in the tools. There is always the possibility that a company like this will be purchased by another company and that the terms and conditions might change, so if you select this option, keep your eye on the news about Yola and watch for any emails they send you. They are not required to update you about changes to their policies.

Notes

Note: You must update your website frequently. If you don’t make any updates over the course of one year, Yola can pull your site.

Note2: Carefully review the Terms and Conditions from Yola and the Terms of Service from Google, since, by clicking the start button, you agree to these terms. Yola’s are published on the site and explain exactly what you get, the limits of the license, and the problems that could potentially arise.

Note3: Your free website has only 5 pages. There are upgrades available and through them you can also access third party products like stock photography to make your website prettier and expand the functionality of your website.

Note4: Yola provides a series of videos about how to make a better website. Even if you choose not to use their service, you might want to watch them; they are basic and discuss some of the things you should think about. I still advise you to download and fill in my free web-planner to make sure you cover off all these points and have a written record of you decisions.

Step One – Get Started

Go to the Get Started page. Click the big red button to go to the registration page. You will need to provide them with an email address and a password. If you don’t have email, pop over to Google or Yahoo and sign up for a free email address.

Step Two – Choose a .ca Domain

On the next page, click the red button to choose a .ca domain name. A popup box will load. Type in your preferred domain name and click the button. It will check to see if the domain name is available. If the result is “Excellent” then click the blue “Get” button. You will be redirected to a payment centre where you must provide a credit card number so that they can bill you after your free first year is over.
You must also fill in CIRA registration type because CIRA can only offer .ca domains to Canadians.

Note: If you don’t have a credit card, you cannot use this service. They do not take Paypal or any other online payment options.

Step Three – Choose a Template

• Choose a template by choosing from a category or choosing a blank website. Yola gives you a list of recommended pages which you can select or de-select according to your needs. For example, if you choose Creative Arts, they will suggest a home page and 4 pages, including a gallery.
• Provide rudimentary content with which they can populate your pages. You can edit the information later.
• Choose a style. I recommend that you peruse the gallery completely before clicking a thumbnail since as son as you click a thumbnail,  Yola goes into action to create a mini-site for you.

A final warning, when I tried the system, my mini-site failed to load.

Blogs are Free

Another way to set up a free website is to create a blog on Blogspot, WordPress, or one of the other public blogging platforms. Most of them allow you to assign a domain name to your blog so that www.mycompany.com points to it.

Blogging is simple. Truly simple. There are over 133 million blogs online. Children create blogs. Seniors create blogs. Blogging was designed to be an easy for ordinary people to go online to share their thoughts. It was not intended as a cheap way to build a corporate website, but that doesn’t prevent you from using it for that purpose.

A System for Managing Content

Blogs are a form of content management system. The content you develop is entered through an online administration panel and stored in a database on the server. The texts, photos and video are stored as individual elements. When a web page is called, the server collects the content that is linked to the page (the text and graphics) along with information about how to present the content to visitors (the styling or design elements). Since your content is kept separate from your overall design, you can easily update the look of your website simply by changing the template or design assigned to it.

Most blogging platforms offer both posts and pages as ways to load up your content. The navigation menu is generated automatically and lists the pages individually and the posts by category.

Pages are used to display information that rarely changes such as contact details and service agreements.

A post category is a topic about under you may display many individual posts. For example, you might have a post category called “Featured Products” and every week write a new post about a product in your store. Visitors entering the site will see the menu item “Featured Product” and when they click that item, they will see your most recent post, followed by previous posts.

Notes

Note: The most difficult part of creating a blog is deciding what your topics will be.

Note2: Blogging sites usually allow you to generate as many pages and post categories as you want and they have search features that help your visitors find information on your website.

Note3: Blogging software is versatile if you have access to the complete package. Blogging platforms do not provide that access for free. The free option is limited in what it can do although all of the platforms offer a number of add-on modules to extend the functionality of your website. For example, you could add a module that displays your Tweets.

If blogging is the option you choose to pursue to create your free website, check out what modules are available on the different platforms and choose the platform that overall best matches your needs.

Note4: Down the road, if you want to upgrade, you can export the database and import it to another platform or to the full package. You will never need to recreate your content again.

Popular Blogging Sites

The two most popular free blogging platforms are

• Blogger from Google, and
• WordPress

Weebly

Over 6 million people use Weebly. It is a blog-like option with many templates to choose from and a drag ‘n drop interface that makes it easy to design your website. It allows you to add video, has an application to help you design forms, and hosting is free with no advertising attached.

You can build your website collaboratively by allowing multiple web editors access to create content.

There are limited features, but more than enough for the average person.

You can point your domain name to your Weebly website.

It’s easy to get started.

• Go to Weebly.com and provide a username, email and password.
• Select the type of website you want to create
• Choose to point a domain name to your Weebly account, be a sub-site at Weebly, or buy a domain. If you choose to buy a domain name it will redirect you to a site through a popup window where you can complete the purchase
• You will instantly find yourself in a drag and drop interface that allows you to drag boxes onto the screen which you can then edit. At the top of the page are a number of options to add pages or change the basic settings. On the left are options for more complex types of content such as multimedia and forms
• When you are done, click Publish.

I found it difficult to resize and reposition elements on the page but otherwise this was an easy-to-use product. They don’t push expensive upgrades and the only forced advertising on the website is a button at the bottom of the page referring visitors to Weebly to make their own free websites.

The biggest drawback that I saw was that there were no resources to help you plan your website and the variety of templates is extremely limited.

However, and this was very cool, there is

• an advanced editing solution that allows you to go in and completely rewrite all the HTML and CSS code. Not for the faint-hearted, they warn you that they are not responsible for anything you do in the advance code editor
• places to add your own favicons, search engine optimization meta tgs, analytics code, ecommerce merchant account information, and mobile settings
• you can archive your site or delete it with one button.