My First Time Was The Best (20m.com)

Member Name: shewhosmiles

Product:	20m.com
Date:	15/01/03 (103 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free, Easy to understand, Little downtime

Disadvantages: Disappearing stats

When I decided that I wanted a website in January 2001 I looked at a lot of web hosts but didn't have a clue what I needed and what all those technical terms meant describing the different services on offer. I'm still a bit dodgy with technical terms so this opinion has to be simplified enough for me to understand what I'm writing about.

My lack of understanding and Yorkshire common sense told me to look for a good free host and learn my needs while I went along rather than confusing myself by trying to figure it all out beforehand. That way I would be able to move on to a paid for host once I was ready. A friend recommended 20m who were chosen by CNET as the best free web space provider to me. It's easy enough to find in the search engines, just type in www.20m.com

On the home page you are offered 3 paid for options (more about those later) and the free hosting option of 20 MB web space. 20 MB (megabytes) doesn't sound a lot but it's surprising just how many pages and items of clip art can be loaded on to your web space. The downside of free web space is that, as with most unpaid for hosts their banners will appear on your pages. 20m try to keep their banners in tone with your site and I’ve never seen them promoting anything dodgy.

At the side of each option you will see 'sign up'. Click on the appropriate one and you will be taken to a page where you can choose your domain name. When I joined you could only use a 20m domain name which is free. For instance if your site is about bananaskins your domain name would be www.bananaskin.20m.com

Now there are 2 more options. You can buy a domain name through them or if you already have a domain name you can transfer it to be used with your free site. With hindsight, if I were starting up again I would buy my domain name with my regular provider who gives an excellent service and claim to be the cheapest in the world and use the transfer facility. <
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Once you have chosen your domain name you then get a page tempting you with payment options and the free option tucked away at the bottom. When you sign up you agree to their ads, occasional pop ups and promotional emails.

The next page asks for your name, your chosen password, email address, date of birth, sex, postcode and country. Underneath that there is a list of interests for you to choose email offers from. I never choose any of those when I sign up for anything so don't know what they are like. Then you have to agree to their terms and conditions some of which are that they have a zero tolerance for spam, pornography and warez. Each person can only open one free account and if there is no activity for 60 days they may delete the account to free up resources.

Once you have agreed to their terms you get a confirmation email within a few hours listing your access link to your member area, domain name, user name and password and can start to build your site. The first time that you access your member area you can check a ‘remember my password’ box so you won’t have to remember your user name and password every time you enter the member area.

MEMBER AREA 1.

This area is quite extensive but the first three options that you see are:

1) Build a site using our templates.
Their templates aren’t too dire and my nephew who is using this facility at the moment tells me that it’s easy to use and understand.

2) Copy an existing web site from somewhere else.
I haven’t used this facility but they claim that if you have a site hosted elsewhere that it can be quickly and easily copied to your 20m space.

3) Upload a web site from your computer.
a. Using their File Manager.
This facility I have used and will go into more detail later.
b. Using Front Page Extensions.
I now use the Front Page web load and update facility.
c. Using Macromedia
Dreamweaver
Although I’ve got this I haven’t tried it out properly yet.

Help Files

They give answers to almost every question that you might ask when you can access them. A downside there is that the help files are not always available. If you have a question that isn’t answered in the help section there is a link to email the hosts and they usually answer within a day and are helpful.

UPLOADING YOUR SITE

My first web pages were pretty basic. I took a 7 week Internet course in html and built them in WordPad. Once my home page (always called index) was passable I was keen to see it on the Internet. I was advised during the course to download CuteFTP to transfer my files. I didn’t understand how to use that so it was a great relief to find that I could upload everything using the File Manager that 20m provide you with.

You access that through your member area by choosing the upload files option. You come to the page called the File Manager, where you can upload up to 5 separate files, create folders to put them in, edit online, delete or rename files – sometimes necessary because I forget if I have used a capital or not in a link and the links are case sensitive.

The 5 separate files can include a mixture of images and pages, but that depends where you want to put them. Usually you create a separate folder and call it images and direct your clip art to that folder and use the path <“img src=”images/mywhateverpicture.gif”> I found that the function didn’t work properly and my images became those dreaded boxes with crosses in them. I got around that by not having a separate image file and changing the path to <“img src=”mywhateverpicture.gif”>

It took me about a week to figure that out and boy did it feel good to see my images in place. I haven’t used the site builder for some time but it has altered a bit since then. Pe
rhaps they have got rid of that glitch but I won’t know until I do some work on a customer’s site in a few weeks. If it has improved I’ll add that to this opinion.

I can’t check on my site because I now use Front Page 2000 to build and upload my sites. With that you just click on a button and everything is uploaded or updated at once, much simpler than uploading each item individually or 5 at a time.

MEMBER AREA 2.

Once you have uploaded part of your site using the site builder you can continue working on it or updating by clicking on Manage Files or Work On My Site.

*Enhance My Site*

As a proud new site owner I wanted some gimmicks, lots of which can be found on the Internet free but 20m offer a growing amount of extras.

Poll Wizard
These interactive polls are quite good but because they are placed on your domain and not hosted elsewhere as you usually find with free polls you can lose the results if you take your site completely down and repost.

Broken Link Redirect
This is a page that redirects people back to your site rather than an error page appearing.

Change Your Banner Ads
Their banner ads actually. You can choose to have them at the top of every page, a split banner that places a smaller banner at the top and bottom of every page, a pop up (less said!), framed for if your site has framesets or you want them displaying in a frame at the top or bottom of every page, a tower ad that appears and scrolls away automatically, or you can pay for your space and have none of their banners. When you have made your choice there is a limited selection of ways to customise those banners. I chose the banners at the top initially but once the site was earning I upgraded and paid for my space and the banners disappeared immediately.

Slide Show
To display your pictures with multiple slide shows and create thumbnail pictures. I tried that but this dummy did
n’t understand the instructions.

Counter
There are three choices of counters and instructions on how to create your own. I used one of theirs for a while but for some reason it stuck on just over 5000.

Guestbook
It’s always good to have anything interactive on a site and a guestbook is a nice start to enable visitors to leave comments and messages. As with the Poll Wizard you lose the content if you completely download your site, but if you don’t it isn’t subject to the vagaries of being hosted elsewhere.

Form E-Mailer
Their design is pretty basic but good to practice with initially and you can redesign them as you learn more. It’s basically an input form where you can have any number of fields and checkboxes etc. and the results are sent to your e-mail address. You can use that for feedback, bug reports, building a mailing list, surveys, voting and non-secure order forms – with those you are advised not to ask for sensitive information such as credit card numbers.

Corkboard
Like forums but your visitors can post messages under topics of your choice. You can alter the colour and layout, but when it first appeared last year it didn’t work properly.

Webrings
You can link to other sites that share your interests. Supposed to increase traffic but I’ve always been a bit dubious of how well they work.

*Make Money From My Site*

When you click on that link you get a page offering links to lots of affiliate programmes where you earn commission from sales gained from banners or links that you place on your site. There is quite a large variety that includes food & drink, beauty, home, garden, insurance, travel, electronics, leisure and web services. Personally I don’t think that these have much value unless your site has a lot of traffic and targets the type of visitor who is interested in buying these products on the Internet.

*Prom
ote My Site*

Once your site is ready you don’t want it sitting there doing nothing, I didn’t anyway. When you click on this link you are offered paid for promotional choices ranging from a one-time submission for $12.95 to 12 monthly submissions for $74.95. For $49.95 you can have a search engine tune up or you can pay $3.50 for 1000 banner impressions on high traffic sites. If you are feeling really flush you can pay $300 per hour for a consultation on what are the best key words for your site, or you can have your site translated into another language for an unmentioned amount.

When I had my site up and running I paid for a different option costing something like £100. My site was supposed to be entered into the search engines and 5000 banner impressions were supposed to be placed on high traffic sites. I was under the impression that I would get a lot of traffic but that didn’t happen. I consequently found out that offline advertising and an email signature generated more targeted traffic. Personally I wouldn’t pay anybody to promote my sites now unless they were recommended to me and I had proof that they already had sites with high rankings in the search engines.

*View My Site Statistics*

My favourite bit. I became fascinated by the amount of visitors, which pages they had visited and how long they had stayed on my site. One day somebody stayed on for over 3 hours and clicked on 267 links. I could even work out who had visited sometimes by comparing the stats on my message board with my site stats. You can also find out where some of the traffic has come from, if and which search engine has been used and what search strings have been used in the search engines. Sometimes the search strings are hilarious, but the more different words you have on your site the more chance there is of somebody coming across it. I experimented once and used the headline ‘Brand Spanking New’ on my home page; sur
e enough I had visitors looking for sites to do with spanking.

Unfortunately the stats reports don’t come with the free package any more and I can only access them because I paid for the upgrade. Also gone is a free email facility.

*Prepare Meta Tags For My Site*

Meta tags are hidden in the html and are what many search engines use to rank your site. 20m offer a meta tag generator whereby you can include a description of your site and 6 to 20 effective key words appropriate to your site content. When you have done that you are taken to a page where you can choose which pages on your site you wish to have the Meta tags included automatically. The html is also generated and you can opt to paste that into your pages yourself.

DOWN TIME

It can be very annoying to discover that your site has disappeared and an error page is there in its place. In 19 months my site as far as I know has only been down once for a short time. I access it just about every day and have only ever had one visitor complaint. I also get weekly reports from another company and have had 100% up time during the last 11 months.

UPGRADES

With the free sites you have 512 MB monthly bandwidth usage and then they are turned off. To avoid downtime you can pay a $4.95 set up fee and $3.95 per GB. As I didn’t have any problems when I was on the free deal I suspect that the 512 MB is quite a decent amount.

There are three hosting packages where you can pay monthly, twice yearly or yearly. The most expensive costs $14.95 monthly, $74.95 for 6 months and $149.95 for 12 months and offers 480 MB more space, enhanced tools, fancy stats etc. I chose the cheapest package that was quite sufficient for my needs, that costs $5.95 per month, $29.95 for 6 months and $59.95 for 12 months. For that I get ample 50MB space, starter statistics which tell me all I want to know, enhanced tools and of course no blooming banners.

SECURITY


These are not secure e-commerce sites but I have been using PayPal, Nochex and Clickbank with no problems for many months.

CONCLUSION

I think that 20m are excellent for first time site builders free or not. I am happy to pay $59.95 for a year despite knowing that I could find a cheaper host. I have friends who pay far more that complain about downtime and likewise I have friends who pay less and grumble too.

Not all paid for hosts offer Frontpage extensions or File Mangers so to get them with a free host is a big bonus.

I've used several different hosts for myself and customers but so far have found 20m to be the best and easiest to use. I will stay with 20m for as long as they offer such an excellent service and of course my site is making money.

I hope that I’ve made this opinion understandable and that I haven’t made any errors – if I have please let me know.

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