Image via CrunchBaseI've been playing with a site called ucoz.com a little bit, just to see what it can do. It uses CMS (Content Management Systems) to make everything work, which basically means it controls things in the background while you get to do the fun stuff like adding content. It also gives you a lot more control over your site than the old free sites.
You begin by selecting a template for your site design, and there are hundreds of them. Then begin adding modules to your site, such as photo albums, guest books, blogs, and even online games. Modules are web applications that can be added and combined in many ways, allowing you to have anything from a very simple home page to a very complex page. All the modules can be adapted to fit many needs. You're just limited by your imagination. Beyond that, you can add thousands of gadgets and hundreds of widgets, allowing you to do any number of things like add your twitter feed to your page or a sampling of your latest Flickr photos. Then just use the visual editor to add your content - remember, if you can type an email, you can do this. Drag and drop you modules around to make the page yours.
And people like me, who like to get into the html can do that too, so you can have complete control of your pages. Ucoz offers basically unlimited disk space, so you can have as many pages and files as you need. You can upload files with your FTP program or through the online File Manager as well as creating them online with the Page Editor. You can have multiple 'users' who can update pages and publish articles or whatever, so it would be great for collaborative sites. Once you start playing with it, I think you'll find all kinds of fun things you can do, because I don't have time to list everything, and I don't really understand everything it can do, yet. There's a lot of information and help available in the support community forum, so if you don't know how to do something, somebody should be able to help.
Ucoz.com offers free web hosting for anybody, whether you're looking to build a personal website or if you need a site for your business. There are more than 1,000,000 active sites hosted by ucoz.com. They've been around for 5 years, and they're really reliable with 99% uptime. This would be a great way for small businesses who can't afford to pay for web hosting or a web designer to get a presence on the web. If you've got your own domain, you can set that up to work with ucoz, too.
If you've been thinking about getting your own free web page, then be sure to check it out. See if it's something you can use. See what you can do with it.
