The other day I had a wonderful meeting with two amazing entrepreneurs here in town, when their website goes live I’ll tell you who they are but for now, let’s just say meeting with them was wonderful and it reminded me why I do what I do. During the meeting, one of the two told me that she’d like a blog on her web page but she didn’t want to pressure her developer to put it up.

The next day, I met with another perfectly amazing client who runs a local foundation and she told me she’d love to be able to run a blog or update her own website but … are you ready for this? … she didn’t want to trouble me to make it work. Let me be blunt, clear, concise and perfectly honest with everybody … if you ever feel that you’re troubling your web person with your petty troubles of getting your business online and making it the best business you can hope for, it’s time to leave them.

In my case, she didn’t realize how easy it was to put up a blog and that was my fault. In the two years I’ve been working with her, I’d never clearly explained how simple it was so she didn’t know. I’ve since corrected that mistake. For the rest of you (including the wonderful people I met with last week) here’s a few suggestions to putting up your website without needing to trouble a grumpy pre-madonna:

thisismyurl.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/blogger.jpg" rel="lightbox[roadtrip]">Blogger.com
This is run by Google and it’s amazingly cool / easy to use no matter how little you know about the web. Basically once you’ve setup a standard Google account, you can use that to create a blogger site for free. Use Google’s free GMail for sending and receiving email and you’ve build a complete online web presence without spending a penny or dealing with a stressed out web developer.

WordPress.com
My personal favorite, WordPress will let you setup and run your own  site in minutes. Like Blogger, it’s free but also has some premium extras such as hosting your own domain name. Also like Blogger.com, it’ll take less time to set up then standing in line at a coffee shop.

BlueHost.com
BlueHost isn’t quite the same as the first two options, it’s a full hosting environment which means that you’ll get your own email addresses, remote hard drive for transferring files, you can register a domain name through them and you’ll be able to properly brand your business. It costs less than $100 per year and takes about three hours to setup your first website. I wrote a piece a while back about setting up a site for less than $100.

Later this week I’ll fill you on how to setup your domain name, hosting and the look for your website. You can stay up to day of my latest posts by subscribing to my RSS feed or email notifications.