Hey Y'all,
For all webmasters and webmasters-to-be, I've got some stuff for you. I'll tell y'all about some good site building services and good tools to use alongside. Site Services
Yahoo Geocities - Yahoo! (Y!) has a nice service for making sites. You start with a white page and do everything yourself. Optionally, you can use a template and make it a bit easier. It has great options like Y! widgets, background music, backgrounds, and much, much more.
Freewebs - It's a service with a little less freedom than Y! Geocities, but it would be better for beginners. It has many more widgets than Y!, and has many features alike. By default, it uses a template, but optionally you can do an all html page.
Google Page Creator - Google's site builder is another nice site creator for beginners, but gives more freedom than freewebs. It has multiple page setups to make it look however you would like it to. You can also program totally html alongside the standard method.
Forum Services
Forumotion - If you want a forum, this is a great service to use. Very simple but looks great. There are also instructions on how to set a forum up with Google Webmaster Tools.
InvisionFree - Another free service for forums. Not as nice as forumotion, but still good.
vBulletin - A very popular service used by many professionals. Although it does cost, it is worth it. It looks better than any of the others. It, however, would be more for advanced users.
Webmaster Services
Google Webmaster Tools - A very nice service to track things such as visitors and site stats (page problems, hits per day). You also have the option of adding a sitemap. Here's a tip: if you make a sitemap, submit it to search engines instead of your homepage. That way, they won't have to have a bot index your site. Instead, they will have a list of pages right there.
AdSense - You've probably seen places on the internet where sites will have boxes that say Ads by Goooooogle. Those boxes are what you get when you sign up for Google Adsense. You sign up, and then make those ad boxes, search boxes (you can also make a custom search engine and get some $$$ off of it as well), video players and more. When people click the ads or do a search and click the ads in the results, you get money. You can post the ads on your own site, or get friends to put it on theirs. You can also put your number in on Qassia to make some money.
Adwords - Adwords is what you use to make the little ads in the Adsense boxes or on the Google search result pages. With this, you get to make your own ad to go in those places. But, you pay for this service by the number of clicks on the ads.
Submit Express - Here, you can submit your site to search engines make meta tags, analyze meta tags, and find out some popular keywords to use for your site.
XML-Sitemaps - You can used this to generate a sitemap to use in Google Webmaster Tools. Remember, submit your sitemap to search engines.
Domain Services
GoDaddy - A popular domain registrar. You can get any of the most popular types of domains: .us, .biz, .info, .net, .com, .org, and more.
Yahoo! Small Business - It's pretty much the same as GoDaddy. With this, you may get special services for Y! Geocities.
Dot TK - A great free domain service. Easy sign-up and completely free.
Co.Nr - Another free domain service, not as nice as Dot TK, though.
You can find links to all the sites below where it says "Sites I mentioned" There are also examples of the forums.
