 Website review: Yola
Tallulah Habib
Build your own website, for free.
Want a website but don't want to pay a fortune for design and hosting? You don't need to know complex html; you can do it through Yola!
Yola began its life in 2006 as Synthasite, a South African start-up. It has now become a worldwide success as possibly the most well-known website builder and hosting service since the demise of Geocities.
To start your website, all you have to do is register for an account. You will then be directed through various options such as template and name for your website. After this, you will be given the ability to edit the site visually and add content. Once the site is complete, you can publish it to the web, either using Yola or self-publishing to a .zip folder on your computer for you to manually upload to another server.
The free Yola sites get a Yola subdomain (e.g.: http://mywebsite.yolasite.com). If you wish to pay a bit more, though, Yola will give you your own domain name (e.g.: http://www.mywebsite.com) for $20 a year.
There are other options if wanting to create something more professional. Yola Silver is $50 a year and includes the domain name – pretty much the standard offer with most online website-building tools. However, Yola also gives you credits for a variety of useful services – some of them external like Facebook Advertising and HP Logoworks. Where there's a “silver” option, there's usually a gold one too. In this case, it's Yola Premier, which is professional website design HP Logoworks for $349 a year.
If you don't know where to start, there's a community forum and a bunch of tutorials that can help you on your way. You can also view a gallery of sites created with Yola for inspiration.
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