There have long been professional services that will build you a website to order. Businesses should of course make the most of them. But these days, the rest of us can achieve a great deal by putting together a portfolio solution made up of free services from around the web. Select what you want, and assemble at home.

A few people have asked me recently about the best way to do this or that on the internet. The questions are usually framed in a way that says ‘Here is my situation. These are the things I wish to accomplish. What service exists to fill that need in a cost effective (or free) manner?’

For instance, my brother-in-law emailed me yesterday. He wants to get off Geocities and set up a website that could host the many photos (and now videos) he’s taking of their impossibly cute child. They want to satisfy our globally dispersed family’s insatiable appetite for news and images.

While you may not be in exactly the same situation, it’s entirely likely that you are in a fairly relatable one. Or might be, if you gave it some thought.

Now, as a user of a free internet homepage (remember those?), he’s reached the limits of what Web 1.0 can offer at no cost. He understands that things have moved on – and wants to take things further.

However, although he’s concerned about the limitations on bandwidth that a Geocities account has, he doesn’t want to spend money on a professional website hosting service just for his personal use.

So… instead of going to a web designer and paying for the services of a web host, he has a list of things he wishes to accomplish – and there are a number of services that each do part of what he wants for free. Today’s solution is to select all of the parts that you want – and build it yourself.

Of course, a blog is a good way to keep everyone up to date with the latest, and he’s aware that my blog is hosted here on Blogger.com, so he wondered if that might be the way to go.

In case this might be of use to you as well as just to him, here’s what I said in reply:

Blogger.com isn’t a website host. It lets you set up a blog, and it’s not fussy about how many people visit – but you can’t build a website and host it at Blogger.

There are a number of sites that will allow you to do what you want to do. If it was me, I’d put it in blog format, so you can post latest pictures as individual posts rather than simply have a gallery. To do that, you could always host the pictures on something like Flickr.

My pick based on what you want to do would probably be WordPress.com, which allows you to have pages other than just your blog. So you can maybe have a gallery section or an ‘about us’ page that will do all that stuff. They won’t host the picture files though. Just the site itself.

Now, the great thing about a blog is that it gives people a reason to come back. They are inherently things that (should) get regularly updated – as opposed to static websites that even if they are amended daily, never look like they change much.

You can also subscribe to a blog using RSS.

As far as the image hosting goes, I reckon between Flickr (photos) and YouTube (videos) you could post all the images you’d ever wish to just by embedding them into your WordPress (or Blogger or whatever) site like this:

I have a free account at Flickr – and that lets me upload 10Mb of photos a month, I think (no other limits). I should probably use it more than I do. A pro account is US$24.95 a year, which most people seem to think is a bargain – but if you were to resize your digital photos for the web (say, no more than 100k per pic, which would give you a good 800×600 pixels in size – more than enough), that would get you 100 photo uploads a month, which is just fine for me…

And so on.

Now, I also have friends who want to start podcasting. Again, I’d go with WordPress.com – and I’d host the media files with OurMedia.org. They provide free storage and free unlimited bandwidth forever for all your digital media: audio, photos, videos – whatever.

Make sure you use Feedburner as well – they’ll make your RSS feed much more friendly.

There are so many services today that will give you a very professional result at no cost whatsoever. Again, I stress that you might want to get a web designer and webhost involved if you’re going to go for a commercial enterprise – but the home user can make and publish a very high quality of new media for nothing but time and effort.

If you want to go for an even more professional look, get yourself your own domain name and point it at your free blog service of choice. For the price of a couple of pints of lager per annum, you get www.yournamehere.com – and then all the rest for nothing. It’d also be a good idea to make friends with someone who’s handy with the photoshop or a bit of graphic design for that extra bit of flair (thanks, incidentally, to Spoonford for my new snaps).

But the fun doesn’t stop there. These days it’s all about the sharing and the assembly of disparate parts. One of the great things about all the new web 2.0 services is that you can use them to build your own web.

I mean, you can publish your calendar, talk and videoconference live, create chatrooms, share your bookmarks, even create your own interactive crossword.

Now that’s classy.