THE BEST WEB HOST IS RELATIVE

Please note that you can also see all the posts under this topic by going here and that posts are listed in reverse-chronological order (to keep this main topic post at the top)  Everything that I review will be listed in this one post, however.

From free website design software to free graphics programs and SEO advice, here’s a list of everything you need to get your site up and running with a budget of $0.00. Now that’s affordable.

Free Graphics Programs:

Paint.net:  This is almost too good to be true, a graphics program that combines ease-of-use with extraordinarily powerful features, but here it is:  http://www.paint.net/.

BeFunky.com:  You can read my review and see some examples here BeFunky Review

Inkscape:  This is an easy to use drawing tool with a lot of professional features. You can read my “sort-of” review here - Inskape Review – and actually see a picture I drew using it, or you can just go here to download the program: Inkscape

Clker.com:  An easily navigated site with loads of quality, free clipart.  See my review here – Clker Review – or just go straight to Clker and start grabbing your free clipart here:

FileZilla:  My review is here FileZilla Download

For some really interesting sites that offer unique Wordpress themes, see here: Some Fantastic Free Wordpress Themes

This is the second post in category 2.

This is almost too good to be true, a graphics program that combines ease-of-use with extraordinarily powerful features, but here it is:  http://www.paint.net/.

Paint.Net is really amazing.  For absolutely nothing, with no strings attached, you get a program that for most people will be just as good as PhotoShop. 

Don’t be put off by the site design.  Just download the product, install it, and start having some fun.

Filled with advanced features like easy layering and pixel selection, about the only thing this software doesn’t have is text effects, but with more than a hundred fonts and easy gradient tools, you may not even need them.   Anyway, for $0 with no strings attached, they don’t even run ads, you really can’t ask for more.

Go and give it a try.

Sometimes you don’t have a program that can do really sophisticated effects on photographs.  Usually those cost money.  But before you run out and buy one, here’s a free spot online you can try, no strings attached at all.  It’s called BeFunky.com, and it can do some really funky things with your pictures.

There are a whole lot of different options. You just upload a photo from your computer and start trying them out.

Just as an example of what you can do there, we’ll take a picture of my daughter standing in front of a nasty lime-green cinderblock wall at her school. Here’s the original photograph:

Now here are some examples (many, many more can be done) of some one-click changes possible at BeFunky.

On this last one, I added one of their many borders available by clicking on the “Goodies” button at the bottom of the page.  Obviously, if you are trying to do a professional site, you don’t want the little “befunky” stuff at the bottom, but that is easily cropped with any program, even the Paint program that comes with Windows.

I’ll tell you how much I like FileZilla. This free FTP tool is so easy to use and so powerful that I’m tempted not to even link to other free FTP tools.

Set-up is nothing. It loads with the ease that a professional program should. And if you know even the slightest bit about using FTP, you can be using in in no time. And if you don’t know anything about FTP? You’ll still be using it in no time.

All you do to get started is click the top-left button below file and fill out your host information and your password for your host and you are done. If you have sites across multiple hosts, as I do, you can set up multiple sites just as easily and you even get a little dropdown bar next to the button to select which site you are wanting to connect to.

To get FileZilla, go here: FileZilla
To read their documentation, go here: File Zilla Documentation

That should get you going. If you have any problems, you can contact me through the contact form under “help.”

Okay, this is going to be a lousy review for one major reason (there are a number of minor reasons, but we’ll ignore those): I have no artistic ability whatsoever. So I’m dealing with a severe problem here, in that I have no idea what you would want out of a drawing tool.

But I CAN tell you a couple of things. For one, it was easy to download and install. For another, it is intuitive enough that I was quickly able to start drawing (or what passes for drawing with me).

In fact, using the path smoothing tool, I was actually able to get a reasonable picture drawn:

Now, to let you know just how crappy a drawer I am, I actually brimmed with pride after finishing this picture and showed it to everyone I know.

You can get Inkscape here: Inkscape

By the way, if you ever need a clipart pig, you can have that one free of charge and without use limitations ; )

There are a lot of places where you can sign up to get royalty free clipart, and I’ll get to talking about those eventually, but nothing makes my heart happier than to find a great and truly free service, and that is where Clker.comcomes in.  It is the largest collection of absolutely free (you don’t even have to register with the site) clipart that I have been able to find and could be invaluable when setting up your site.

You can pretty much use the images for anything, from the design in your web hosting, to making t-shirts, fliers, newsletters–whatever you need clipart for.

I was unable to determine from looking around the site just how many clipart images they have, but there are quite a lot and they are adding more every day.  You have the option of selecting a category and scanning through what is there, or just entering what you are looking for in the search box and going from there (that’s the easy way).  Just as an example, I typed in penguin and was presented with 53 different images.  A search for “Web Hosting” got me nothing, and “hosting” got me a generic, rather old-fashioned, computer, but the word “web” got me a pageful of pictures with some nice looking servers (not to mention a bunch of spiders and some odd things I’m not sure how to relate to “web”).

Some of the art is fantastic,  some of it is…well…sub-fantastic; but overall I would rank the quality very good, and the majority of the pictures are of a decent size and seem to scale pretty well.  Certainly, given the extraordinary cost of nothing, I would certainly visit there, particularly if you are only looking for a single picture or two, before buying a clipart program or signing up for one of the different services online.

Bottom line:  It’s as close to perfect as free can get, one of those rare online gems.