SiteGround Tutorials

Great Ideas for Your Website

Get in touch with millions of people around the world. Popularize your work and ideas. Give and get help. Make money. Find new friends, customers, and business partners. You can do all that and much more through your website!

No matter if you are now starting your website, or you have already built it, this article will give you 10 new and interesting ideas how to use your web space and easy tools to realize them:

Have a gallery on your website

Share your photos and videos on your website and make them easily accessible by people from all over the world!

Have a blog on your website

Create a personal blog on your website to share your ideas and find new friends from all over the world!

Have a forum on your website

Create a forum on your website to give and get help and exchange information with various people!

Sell products on your website

Stay at home, spend time with your family, be your own boss and .... make money through your website!

Have a community website

Use your website to help your community and popularize its activities and achievements in front of the world!

Have a family website

If your have relatives who live far away, make them feel part of the family through your website!

Have a hobby website

If you are really passionate about something, tell people about it and attract new fans for your hobby.

Have a portfolio website

Exhibit your work on your website! Make your portfolio accessible on the net and attract sponsors and fans.

Have a personal email

Having a personal email on your web space is important for people who do business!

Store files on your web space

Use our website to quickly upload, download, and share audio, video, graphics, pictures, and other big files!

You may use this tutorial for your own use. You may not distribute it in any form without the express permission of the publisher. You may provide a link to the publisher's web site, where this tutorial can be used from. This tutorial is provided free of charge and without any warranty of any kind.

Have a gallery on your website

If you like taking pictures with your camera, your website may be the perfect place to show them! With the help of gallery software on your website, you can quickly upload and conveniently arrange you pictures in albums.

Through your gallery on your website, you can easily make your photos accessible to friends from all over the world! Instead of attaching your photos one-at-a-time to email messages, you can simply give your friends a link (the URL of your website) and show them how wonderful your summer vacation was, how your baby is growing up, or how much fun you had at the last party.

How to create an online gallery?

It's actually very simple! There are lots of free gallery scripts that allow you to have a full-featured gallery on your website without any effort. You just download and install some files and your site is up and running! To make it even easier for you, SiteGround image hosting services include free gallery installation on your website.

To help you find the best gallery script for your website, we have featured the two most popular and user-friendly ones. Any of the two scripts is a powerful tool for uploading, organizing, and managing your photos online.

SiteGround also provides free tutorials to help you manage your gallery:

Have a personal blog on your website

Having a blog on your website is a powerful way to express yourself and popularize your ideas! Many famous people like Madonna and Larry King have blogs. Companies also have blogs. Look at Google! Thanks to their blogs, Madonna, Larry King, and Google are able to reveal to a more human aspect of who they are, justify their ideas, and make themselves even more popular.

Your online blog will certainly help you attract many like-minds and find new friends. You can let people post comments on your blog and thus get valuable feedback on your ideas from various interesting people.

How to create a personal blog on your website?

This is really easy! There are free scripts that allow you to have your own blog on your website. With SiteGround blog hosting services you get a free blog installation and you can have your blog site up and running in just a few minutes' time.

To help you find the best blog script for your website, we recommend you the most popular and user-friendly one:

WordPress

SiteGround also provides a free tutorial to help you manage your online blog without any hassle:

WordPress Tutorial

Have a forum on your website

Having a forum on your website is a powerful way to get and give help on various issues! The forum allows you to exchange information, feedback, and opinions with all the new and interesting people who visit your website. Through your forum, you start discussion on any topic that is important for you and you may receive opinions from people all over the world. Or, you may also request help from your forum members on any topic for example how to submit your site to Google, how to fix your car engine, or anything else you need to know.

How to create a forum?

There are many free forum scripts that help you create a forum (also called discussion board) in a few clicks. You simply need to download and install some files to make your forum appear online. If that sounds too difficult, with SiteGround forum hosting services you receive a free installation and set up of your new forum.

To help you build your online forum easily, we recommend you the most popular free forum scripts:

PhpBB
SMF

SiteGround also provides you an easy and useful tutorial to help you administer your online forum:

Have an Online shop

Sell Your Own Products/Services

Selling your own products online is profitable and easy! Nowadays, you may sell anything on the Internet - books, clothes, food, services, etc. Why not sell even your own reflections or essays? If you have a know-how or expertise that no one else has, you may certainly sell that through your website. Costs for selling online are really low - you only have to maintain your website alive and put relevant content about your product on that site.

Thanks to the Internet and your website, you have access to millions of people all over the world who actively search the net for anything new and interesting. It is also a well-known fact that consumers are more prone to spend money online, from the convenience of their homes. Why not take advantage of all these favorable circumstances and start selling your own product, service, book, or anything else you wish?

How to sell products online?

To sell products on your website, you need 3 things: a shopping cart, an SSL certificate, and a merchant account with a payment gateway. Don't panic, it's really easy with our business hosting services with comprehensive Ecommerce Pack where we have it all ready for you to get started!

Sell Third-parties' Products/Services

Selling third-party's products on your own website is even easier than selling your own because you have it all ready to get started! This process of selling other's products is called affiliation or referral.

Just affiliate with a company that you like and refer your site visitors to its products. If your visitors like the products, they will buy them and you will get commissions or other benefits for referring. Thus through your website, without any effort, you will see your revenues accumulating.

SiteGround hosting service is an excellent example of how you can do that. As you already use our service and you know its advantages, you may competently recommend it to your site visitors by placing a referral banner on your website. In return, for every sale you help us make, SiteGround adds months of free hosting to your account.

How to sell "third-party products"?

It's very simple! Most companies that sell online have special Affiliate or Referral programs, which guarantee you commissions for sending them new customers and provide you with "advertising materials", or referral banners. To get started, just place a referral banner or link of your affiliate company on your website so that your site visitors learn about that company.

SiteGround also offers you such Affiliate and Referral programs. Through these programs, you get special referral banners. For every client who signs up for an account through them you may get 20% of each sale or free months of hosting services.

You may learn how to join the SiteGround Affiliate and Free Hosting Programs below:

You may also sell third party products by taking advantage of the so-called "drop shipping" technology. To learn more about it, check the page below:

Doba drop-shipping

Have a community-oriented website

Dedicating your website to your community is a powerful way to unite and help your community! You may dedicate your website to your town, church, fraternity, guild, etc and upload news and resources to the use of all community members. Such a website will certainly help your community get closer together, and unite around common problems and events.

Through your website, you may also popularize your community! You may post interesting facts about its activities and achievements to let the people learn about you . For example, if there is a unique natural phenomenon near your town, why not tell people about it? Such information may attract lots of tourists, make your town popular, and improve the lifestyle of your community.

How to create a community-oriented website?

There is a number of free Content management Systems and clan scripts that allow you to have a really powerful community-oriented website. SiteGround recommends you:

Joomla
Mambo

SiteGround support team will install any of those scripts on your account for free upon your request. We also provide you with free tutorials to help you easily manage your community website:

Have a family website

It's a great idea to dedicate your website to your family! This is especially useful when some of your family members live at a distance and you see each other rarely. The website will help you unite your family and share interesting facts about each other's life.

On your family website, you may upload your wedding album, pictures of your newborn baby, sound files with your baby's talk, or any other information that might be interesting to your family. This will certainly help them feel closer to you.

How to create a family website?

There are many ways you can go about building your family website. You may use any content management system or blog that you like. If you have never heard of any of those, we recommend you the most user-friendly and free ones:

If you wonder which one to choose, you may contact our Sales Department and have them assist you with the choice. After you choose your script, you may contact the SiteGround support team to have the script installed on your website for free.

SiteGround offers free tutorials to help you manage your family website easily:

Have a hobby-oriented website

If you are really passionate about your hobby, why not tell the world about it? No matter if you like playing American football, cycling, gardening, watching movies, cooking, listening to Jennifer Lopez or else, you may dedicate your website to that hobby of yours. Thanks to your website, you can make your hobby more popular, learn new and interesting facts related to that activity, and attract followers.

Websites dedicated to famous actors and singers are very popular as well. Passionate fans often dedicate their websites to their favorite stars. These websites become the focal point of large fanclubs and bring lots of people with the same interest together.

How to create a hobby-oriented website?

There are many ways you can build your hobby website. We recommend you to use a free content management system, or a blog script to build such a website. The two most user-friendly and free scripts are:

Select which one you wish to use and contact the SiteGround support team to have the script installed on your website for free. SiteGround offers free tutorials to help you manage your hobby site easily:

Create an online portfolio

You are a free-lance designer, painter, photographer, poet, or a person of the arts? Then you certainly have a lot to show! You can make a portfolio website to exhibit your work. Thanks to the Internet, your portfolio will have a worldwide access and make your work popular. Through your website, you will most certainly be contacted by fans and sponsors.

How to create a portfolio?

There are various free scripts that might help you build a portfolio website. However, to keep it really easy for you, we recommend you to use the SiteGround SiteBuilder. It's a comprehensive tool that gives you great flexibility when uploading your content. It also has more than 80 templates for your website design. There is a nice and easy SiteBuilder tutorial that you can find here.

Have a personal email

Having a personal email on your domain is a really smart way to make use of your web space! Your email address reveals your unique online identity to the your message recipient. Instead of having a meaningless ID on your yahoo mail like r_at123@yahoo.com, you may have an easily memorable address like support@siteground.com, mike_perry@yourdomain.com, or anything that shows who you really are to the email recipient.

Having a personal email is really essential for people who do business! It looks much more professional to send messages via your personal email (on your company's domain) when communicating with your business partners, sponsors, and clients.

Having a personal email is also a convenience. Unlike the Google and Yahoo emails, you will be able to reach your personal email both via webmail access and via convenient mail clients like Outlook express, MS Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc. Also, the email address you have on your domain name will not show any ads which lower the speed of your Internet connection and lose your time.

How to create a personal email account?

You may have your personal email address in less than 20 minutes! You only need to have email hosting space and a domain. Then, you may create your email account(s) from the control panel of your hosting account, or contact the SiteGround support team to create your personal email address.

To get detailed instructions on how to create and configure your personal email by yourself, please click below:

Store large files on your web space

Your web space is a great place to store important files! On your hosting account, you may quickly upload, download, and share different text files, photos, graphics, etc. Having these important files on you hosting account will provide a secure back up in case your desktop harddisk crushes and deletes all your work for example.

On your SiteGround FTP hosting account, you may easily upload the files you wish to store online. You can also be confident that they are well protected. SiteGround makes weekly backups of every server to make sure that your work will not be lost. You may also request affordable custom backups to protect your latest uploads.

How to upload files on my web space?

The answer is FTP! This is the fastest and easiest way to upload any file on a server. You may read how to upload content via FTP below:

FTP uploading

Don’t forget that you may always get assistance from the SiteGround support team when uploading your files via FTP!