You see, it really depends what your business is, what sort of web design you get, and what sort of web hosting. The quality of these things can vary a lot. If you are running what is basically an offline business, this could be the answer.

You need the design you want

Let's start with the design. The design of your website needs to be compatible with your business, and should be designed to load fast, with small graphics, and should be easy to navigate. These are essentials. You may find that some firms offering free website design just offer you a selection of template to choose from. This is not good enough. You want to be able to choose any practical design you want.

By practical, I mean anything that can be done with web design tools. For example, the only way to have a circular or hexagonal box on your site is to have an image designed to that shape with the text you want on it. You can't just make boxes of this shape with normal text editors.

Choose your own design

You should be able to scan the web and find the sort of design you like, and either choose your own logo or use the one you already have. You should not be limited in this way. In other words, if you getting a free design there is no reason why it should not be a good design.

Of course, the design should be designed to suit the search engines, with the correct title tags and meta description in the head. And it should be able to include all the information you want.

What you don't want

A warning about the design: make sure the design is not based on frames, which used to be common, nor on Flash, except for some isolated images. If you have a lot of products, you can use a database to call product information up, but as these are dynamic pages they are not liked by search engines. The solution is to include a number of static pages.

Next, you need to consider the hosting. Does this allow you to have the number of pages you need? Are there any limitations on bandwidth - that is a measure of how many people visit your site? And can you upgrade at no cost or little cost if you exceed your bandwidth?

Finally, this sort of service is best for people who run offline businesses, but need an online presence and are not really conversant with the techniques needed on the web. Get these points right, and you will find a free website design with hosting can pay.