Looking for a free website in South Africa?
In today’s article, I will walk you step by step to get the best website in under five minutes.
See, contrary to the popular belief, having a website in 2021 is as easy as copying and pasting text and uploading images, thanks to website builders in South Africa.
Also, as the title of this guide suggests, you don’t need money to build a website. Which makes you wonder;
‘What kind of website is free?’
Well, as you will see in a minute, a free website is no different from the one you hire a designer to help with work, which brings me to say this:
After today, you will never waste your hard-earned money on hiring web developers in 2021.
Why?
Here are the things I hear people complain about hiring someone to help design their sites:
• Subpar work – designers do the work just because of the money. If you think about it, that is unprofessional from every sense of it
• Back and forth exchange of ideas and no tangible progress – this is a big issue for sure. You keep having back-and-forth talks and in the end, nothing really to show
• Some end up changing the terms of the contract in the middle of the project. You won’t miss hearing something like, add the budget because of this or that.
These and many more other things make it a living hell dealing with developers.
Don’t get me wrong here, I am not discrediting all the designers out there. Truth is, there are web designers who act professionally. Problem is, you’d have to go through all this trouble just to get that one good designer.
The question is, is it worth it really?
If no, what’s the solution?
Website builder in South Africa
Here is the thing:
All these troubles can be avoided.
How?
By taking back the control of the whole process. See, you are being treated so because they clearly understand that you don’t have a choice but to use their services.
Well, that was true decades ago, but not today.
With a website builder, you can do the whole work yourself. It saves you money and your insanity.
How does this work?
That is what I am going to show you today.
What is a website builder?
In a nutshell, a website builder is a tool that allows you to build a website without the need for code.
This means that, if you do not have any programming knowledge, have never seen code, or don’t even know what CSS or HTML is, you can build a website.
That may sound like a vague promise, but as you will see, we will build a completely free website in South Africa and no code will be used.
This is the point you fire your web designer. In fact, some of them don’t know how to code either. So, what have you been paying them to do?
It turns out, all they do is take your money, head to free website builders and create a site using it. Astonishing, I know.
For example:
Wix is one of the most popular website builders in South Africa and around the world. How do I know? They boast over 100 million users.
Types of website builders
Before you build a free website in South Africa, there are two types of creator tools you should know.
a) Online builders – these are ones you cannot use unless you have a reliable internet connection. They are mostly web platform-based, just like the WIX we mentioned earlier.
b) Offline builders – as you can guess, you don’t need an internet connection to use these ones. Mostly allows you to export the site as HTML. And examples include; Mobirise, NicePage, and Pinegrow.
The examples here are mostly online builders, but the principles cut across.
How to build a free website in South Africa
We will be using OLITT free website builder.
OLITT is the best tool out there with a ton of cool features. For example:
- Pre-built websites – these are templates that you plug and edit
- Drag-and-drop technology – here, you drag elements and use them anywhere on the site
- Custom domains – with this, you have the option to connect a custom domain if you don’t want to use the free one.
- DNS management – allows you to manage domain names records from a secure environment for free.
We can go on the whole day talking about how awesome OLITT is, but how about we dive into creating you a free website in South Africa?
Steps to build a website in South Africa
Here are the steps to creating a free website in South Africa:
Step 1: Visit Olitt.com
Click on Create Your Free site. This is for the new users. But if you already have an account with Olitt, go ahead and click Login.
Step 2: Selecting Category
What type of website are you trying to build? What is its purpose? Is it a blog, a landing page, or an online store? OLITT has hundreds of templates to choose from.
First, pick the category:
For this tutorial, we will be building a marketing website, thus the marketing category.
Step 3: Pick the template
You have at least 3 choices here. Pick one that is close to what you want.
We are using the second template, social marketing.
Step 4: Start editing
With the template, start chopping off elements you don’t want and adding what you want.
This is where your free website actually starts to take shape and you start to experience the power of OLITT free website builder in South Africa.
Go ahead and hover on top of the template and click on ‘create from’
Step 5: Connect account
With OLITT, you only need your Gmail account.
So go ahead and connect your account here.
If you have more than one Gmail account, pick the one you’d want to use with OLITT.
Step 6: Connect domain or view your new site
In the next window, you can connect the domain or visit to view your new site.
These are the things you can do later on though. So let’s go ahead and start editing some elements of your site.
For example:
We can change the title.
Just double click on it, delete what you don’t like, and write your own.
To change an image, first delete the current image.
On the open blocks section choose image and drag it to the position you want. This then displays a dialogue box.
Choose the current images or choose to upload from your device.
Next, choose the file you’d wish to replace it with. Make sure it is on your computer’s hard drive.
Once selected, it should replace it automatically.
To move elements around, use the element mover as shown below.
If there is nothing else to remove, go ahead to visit
Use visit. Like what you see?
Visit your free website in South Africa.
Step 7: Other operations
Congratulations on building your first free website.
How was the experience?
Well, with the site published, you can do some other stuff. Go to the dashboard to see these options there.
From here, you can see all of your sites (if you have more than one). Also, you can:
- Unpublish the site anytime you want
- Visit the site
- Connect a domain name
- Perform some SEO operations such as adding meta descriptions, changing the title, etc.
- Add plugins – these are applications that add functionality to your new website.
For example:
You can connect the Google Analytics account.
This way, you will have access to break down the analytics of your website’s visitors.
Additionally, if you want to start collecting email addresses, OLITT comes with Mailchimp integration.
It is simple and straight forward.
What do next
With your new website up and running, you can start sharing it on social media to drive traffic.
Alternatively, you can explore the whole OLITT ecosystem and see what else you can do. Perhaps sign up for our affiliate marketing and make a 10% commission every time you refer a paying customer.
Talking of paying, OLITT has premium plans.
Here is the deal, premium packages give you more resources which you will need as your website grow.
Why OLITT?
Besides giving you a free website in South Africa, what else can OLITT offer you?
Well, we mentioned that you can connect a custom domain name. But there is something else you need to know.
OLITT allows you to connect the custom domain even if you are using the free plan. Yes, that’s shocking because no one is doing it, which makes OLITT unique.
As if that’s not enough, OLITT gives you insane discounts on domain names.
Also worth mentioning; OLITT has an inbuilt CDN with over 42 PoPs. This means that all websites created using OLITT load faster, thus giving you an upper search engine ranking.
Wrapping up
Go ahead and try OLITT for free today.
How long does it take to have my free website online
What else must I put on my domain
I thank you Oltt.com for helping us to build our own website as our marketing plan
I’ll be very much glad if my website can be seen by the world