If you want to quickly setup a website for yourself but you don’t know anything about web design, then you may want to give FreeSiteDesigner a try. FreeSiteDesigner is an online web design and publishing tool for the beginners. You don’t need to know any programming languages. You simply sign up an account at FreeSiteDesigner.com, pick a template, fill out the contents, and publish to your web server. The only requirement is that you already have a domain and hosting.

In this post, I will be guiding you through setting up an account and choosing a template. In part two, I will show you the basic functions of FreeSiteDesigner and add some basic contents. In part three, I will show you how to further customize your website in FreeSiteDesigner.

Sign Up Account

Your first step is to sign up an account (everyone knows that!). Just follow the instructions and fill out the required information. You will need to provide a valid email address as they will send you an activation link via email. When you get to the “Website Info” page, think about what you enter for your website URL. For example, if you have a domain mywebsite.com and you wish people to visit your website at http://www.mywebsite.com/subdomain, then you should enter www.mywebsite.com/subdomain as your website URL. If you want people to view your website at http://www.mywebsite.com, then you can simply enter www.mywebsite.com.

FTP Info

For the FTP info, they should be provided by your web hosting service provider. If you are not sure, you should ask your hosting service provider for the following:

• FTP host name e.g. lebokov21.com
• FTP username (should be the same as your username to sign in your hosting account)
• FTP password (don’t tell me this)
• the FTP root folder (this is the tricky part)

The tricky part here is the FTP root folder. You could let FreeSiteDesigner to guess it by clicking the “Auto Detect” button. But most of the time this won’t work. Usually, it is just a forward slash “/” or it can be “/var/www/html”. For Bluehost users, it is “/public_html” without the quotes. If I am going to publish to the “subdomain” folder, then I would enter “/public_html/subdomain” without the quotes.

Once you have submitted the information, you will receive an activation email at the address you provided. You can then activate it and sign in to your FreeSiteDesigner account.

Choosing Mode and Template

Once you are signed in, you will see six large icons. Click on the one that says “Edit Website”. For the first time, you are asked to choose between simple and advanced modes. I suggest you to pick the advanced mode, since I don’t really see much differences between the two. After choosing the mode, you will need to pick a template from a list of categories (just pick one, if you don’t like it, you can easily change it later). You will then be asked to name a few pages for your website.

After you have chosen a template, you can start playing around with the functions and adding contents. I will be talking more about these in part two and three so stay tuned!