Frequently Asked Questions – FAQ

No. We know some services give you “free websites” by making you put up with advertisements that is placed throughout the website. We don’t do that.

Sometimes, some of our sites will have a link at the very bottom to give us credit for building the site. This is what you often see on people’s websites. It usually says the name of the site, and the theme and something like “site by: Real Free Website” with a link to our site and the theme used, or both.

That link helps us out, getting more people a great website at an affordable price. We appreciate it a lot when people leave that link as is, but once you get the website in your possession, you will be able to change, remove, or add anything you want, to anywhere on YOUR website.

Yes, many of the sites listed under our recent work started out as free websites but have been enhanced with custom development or custom design services. You can also hire me for ongoing maintenance or custom services. Examples of these custom services can be things like a webmaster, estore manager, affiliate manager, community manager or WordPress training.

You can call me for a consultation by following this link. You can also email me to ask me about your particular project or idea.

If you have had your domain for a while and if you are using a customized email service, we will leave that as it is. We will adjust MX records and DNS records so that there is no interruption to your email service.

If your domain is brand new, we include free email forwarding configuration. We will make up to three email addresses at your domain and forward them to your regular email address.

Your new web host offers full blown email service included with your webhosting account. Instead of just forwarding email messages, you could have a regular email box that you can use with Outlook, Mail, Thunderbird or even your smart phone. Setting up and configuring email boxes is not included for free.

Yes, we can install WordPress and perform our special setup and configuration for $250.00. Contact us for more information.

All of our sites come installed with the plugin: WordPress SEO by Yoast. We recommend it and use it ourselves in all our sites and client sites. It is one of the top SEO plugins available to customize your Website.

We configure the plugin and make sure it is working, then it is up to you to optimize your content and take advantage of best practices for maximum ranking with the search engines.

Absolutely, you will have full access and control of your website. This allows you to put whatever pictures, videos, pdf files, zip files, or other content that you want.

When you buy your hosting account through inmotion Hosting, you’ll be able to get a free domain. It’s part of the deal.

Generally, and especially for the bonus items we will only install and configure the plugins we have listed. Many times, you have a plugin that you feel is nicer / better / faster, or should be used instead. Our basic setup site comes with the plugins already to go. You may switch them out afterwards or you could have us do it as an additional service.

If you prefer a different plugin be used instead of the one we install, you may request a custom quote by contacting us directly. There is a list of plugins installed here.

The default theme for WordPress may not the best theme for everyone. Each website has its own unique needs so we provide a bundle of additional themes installed for you and  and a list of paid themes for you to find theme that fits you best. We also offer custom design and development, contact us for more info.

Keep in mind you can always install a new theme, configure the existing one, or design your own or hire a designer to do so. Make sure you review the free themes installed on your site, or look for more in our resources page.

The website installation service and configuration is free. You still need to buy a hosting account and your domain. When you buy your hosting through one of my recommended vendors, they will pay me a small commission. This pays for your website installation.

You may also want to read How does this all work?

Your site will come pre-installed with a number of plugins. These can be removed, replaced or uninstalled by the website owner after the website is delivered. It is simple to deactivate and uninstall plugins. Not all plugins are active by default.

List of Plugins Installed

This list is subject to change with or without notice. The final list of plugins installed on a particular website may be different based on clients’ needs and requirements. Some of these plugins do not come pre-installed, they are optional. The ones marked with * and ** are not installed by default, but can be if you select them or indicate you want them when we begin working on your site.

404 Notifier
Custom sidebars
FitVids for WordPress
Floating Social Bar
Google Analytics for WordPress
Google Font Manager
Jetpack by WordPress.com
Page Links To
Q and A
Random Content
Redirection
Simply Show IDs
Responsive Lightbox
SEO Smart Links
Shortcodes Ultimate
Simple Image Sizes
Simple Lightbox
Subscribe To Comments

Additional Plugins Available by default

These are recommended for most sites, but aren’t added by default unless we discuss them in advance.

Akismet *
BackupBuddy **
Blubrry PowerPress *
CloudFlare *
Edit Flow *
Genesis Featured Widget Amplified
Genesis Simple Edits
Genesis Social Profiles Menu
Gravity Forms **
Gravity Forms AWeber Add-On
Gravity Forms Coupons Add-On
Gravity Forms CSS Ready Class Selector
Gravity Forms PayPal Add-On
Gravity Forms Polls Add-On
Gravity Forms Quiz Add-On
Gravity Forms Survey Add-On
Gravity Forms Zapier Add-on
Hierarchical Pages
LeadPages connector **
Limit a Post Title to X Characters
NextGEN Gallery by Photocrati *
Ninja Announcements
nrelate Flyout
nrelate Related Content
OIOpublisher Ad Manager 2.55 **
OptinMonster **
Page Excerpt
Posts By Tag
Post Status Menu Items
PushQuote Plugin
Relevanssi
Simple Social Icons
Social Sharing Toolkit
The Events Calendar
Ultimate Nofollow
Ultimate Posts Widget
Ultimate Tag Cloud Widget
W3 Total Cache
WooCommerce *
Wordfence Security
WordPress SEO *
WP-Instaroll *
WP-PageNavi
WP Google Fonts
WP Super Cache
Youtube Channel Gallery *

* Additional plugins installed & configured on a per project basis. Only one included for free on each site.
** Requires paid license directly from 3rd party See List of Licenses below:

• Genesis plugins require Genesis as a theme. Get Genesis Themes here.
• Get your license for Gravity Forms here.
• Get your license for Backup Buddy here.
• Leadpages connector works only with your Leadpages account, get an account here.
• Optin Monster requires a license, get your license here.

Yes you can. One of the options you can ask for is to have a shopping cart included in your installation. The shopping cart is installed with the basic settings and options. Once you have access to your website, you can start adding your products and selling them online.

The shopping cart is compatible with Paypal (free), or you can integrate a full payment system to accept credit cards and provide a traditional ecommerce experience to your customers. We recommend Authorize.net, you will probably need to pay them a fee to use them. But they are the best in the business.

See this post for more details:

There are three main aspects we cover for you and do for you.

• Install and configure WordPress on your own self-hosted account.
• Your content installed and formatted properly.
• Install & configure DNS, email, and additional special plugins.

I also give you 30-45 minutes of one-on-one time with me, for free over Skype, or over the Phone to go over your site. (this is a limited time offer).

You also have access to the quick start guide to help you get more out of your website.

For more details I would recommend you read this post, titled: What do you get with our Free Website Service?

Your new free website came with many themes already installed and available for you to use. Each theme has different options for customization so your options will vary by theme. Most themes support a custom header and various widget areas.

If you have used the theme options to customize your website and you want to customize it further, you may need to change the CSS styles on your theme in order to change colors, fonts and other design elements of your website.

If this sounds overwhelming, you may need to hire me to help you with this or hire a designer that knows how to work with WordPress. I also would recommend that you use a paid theme that offers more options and support from the vendor. One theme like this that I recommend is Genesis by Studiopress. They have some of the best themes available and they’re fairly easy to customize.

One, because this is not your average free wordpress installation service. Real work besides pushing a button or two goes into setting up your site. In the case of transfers, we also take care of DNS settings and any other technical complexity that might arise. Not to mention the data transfer, link corrections, and other stuff that you probably didn’t even know about.

Two, Because I am trustworthy. I am not going anywhere anytime soon, so if I recommend that you buy something  and this solves your problem, then you should buy it. But if it doesn’t help you then don’t buy it. Perhaps you’re not ready for that particular solution.

Three, This is what I do for a living. If you haven’t, read my blog. I work from home, online and do many things. One of them is this website. This site helps me pay my bills and raise my daughter, and it helps you. Everybody wins!

You can see some of my testimonials here and see what paying customers say over on my Clarity profile.

Yes you can. You have two options.

Option one. Upload your video to your media library and then insert it into a blogpost using some of the Jetpack features for embedding videos. (not recommended).

Option two (recommended). Upload your video to a major video sharing site, like Youtube or Vimeo. Then use the embed code to insert into your pages, sidebar or blogpost.

Your free website comes with a blog built in. You can begin creating blogposts right away, check out the Free Website Quickstart guide for more info.

The blog can also depend on the theme you are using. Sometimes the theme may have options to customize where and how your blog is seen by visitors to your website.

A transfer is when a website is moved as is, from one web host to another web host. Nothing is changed as far as the functionality, look and feel and underlying technology. A migration involves converting a website from one type to another. Generally, we migrate websites from various different platforms into WordPress.

When transferring or migrating your website, under 99% of the circumstances, yes. I will adjust DNS and other related records to make sure your website works in the new environment. We will do our best to identify all the necessary record changes or migrations. Please be sure to let us know of any special setup or configuration you may have.

In all honesty, no, you should not. Wix is a nice looking service but you’ll be locked into their service. If you want to move, you’ll have to copy and paste all your text, and then spend hours downloading your photos one at a time. And many of the features they offer are non standard. Also, their websites are notoriously difficult to find in google searches so your business or blog will suffer tremendously for that.

Wix sites are not mobile friendly out of the box. You’ll need to pay extra for that. With WordPress that depends on your theme and there are hundreds of themes available for free that do an excellent job at providing a responsive experience for your visitors so your site will look great on a big screen, a tablet, or a handheld device.

To put it in perspective, I transfer 3 – 5 people out of Wix into WordPress each month, Nobody that I know has ever gone from WordPress to Wix.

With the website I build for you, or just any WordPress site, you can host pretty much anything you want and most of the time for free. Like an eCommerce store; that’s free with my site, but you’ll have to pay Wix for it on a monthly basis.

Also, it’s about freedom. When you get a website from me, you have WordPress and a top notch host. This means you can always export all your data, anytime you want. You own it completely and you get to decide what you do with it. You can’t quite do that with Wix sites.

On its own, Wix is a great starter service. But when you compare it to what is out there, it falls short in many aspects.

You may receive alerts from time to time which read like this:

“This alert was generated by Wordfence…”

This is to indicate a security event which is monitored by Wordfence. It could be a login, a change of password, a request for a new password, or other notices. I recommend you keep an eye on those and make sure nothing suspicious comes up.

A suspicious alert would be when you receive a “logged in” event, but you haven’t logged into your website recently. That means someone else has logged in to your website.

There’s a lot of confusion going around about WordPress.com and WordPress.org. I will try to explain quickly the difference between the two.

WordPress.com first

WordPress.com is a hosted and managed solution to setup a blog or website. It is mostly used to setup free blogs and places to share content. It is free to start, and your website name will be something like http://name-you-picked.wordpress.com Notice the “wordpress.com” part there. That means it is hosted with that name.

You can upgrade and use your own domain name. And your website would use your own domain, like http://example.com WordPress.com also offers other upgrades like additional storage or the ability to modify the theme beyond the normal theme options.

And WordPress.org is up next…

WordPress.org in the other hand is the website that represents the software that you can use to run your own WordPress website. You can download it from there, unzip it and upload it to your own webhost and start running WordPress. The main difference between using WordPress.com and WordPress.org is that you have more freedom.

With WordPress.org, you can install whatever plugin or theme you need. You can also customize the theme as much or as little as you want without restriction. You can sell advertisements, or not. You can run an eCommerce website, or not. You can create a portfolio to share your magnificent art, or don’t. Emphasis in, yeah, you can do whatever you want with it.

So which one should you use?

If you want to test blogging out and use it occasionally. If you don’t mind that your options are limited but all is taken care of for you, then go to WordPress.com. Just remember that as you grow, WordPress.com generally doesn’t work well for most businesses.

If you want to start a blog, show off a portfolio, sell your wares, or put your business online, you need wordpress.org because you’ll be able to grow it to do whatever you need without having to start from scratch.