Tailoring a domain with free and reliable tools

In this post, I’ll discuss about how to tailor free reliable tools for your domain.

Buy a domain from any service provider who provides DNS service also.. Some service providers charge excess to the actual domain cost. If DNS service is not free, buy it and make sure you can create at least 50 records.

This post doesn’t cover how to setup everything using Google Apps or Live Domains or Blogger. But I’ll list out the options for each service.

As a brief list out, for using any one of the following features, just go through the steps provided by provider and it won’t take more time than 1 min to setup DNS record and setup your mail account. Assuming you’ve own a domain already.

 

Creating Home Page:

          The first step for any domain is creating a home page. The available options for free (if the domain provider doesn’t gave you any default home page)

Service Provider	Pros	Cons	My Rating
Google sites	Ease of design Configurable themes Professional site look Simple integration with Google analytics and Google webmasters Support to include Google gadgets Integrated sitemap Support to directly display Google docs on page Mapping site to a sub domain under main domain Integrated search engine Ability to create unlimited sub domains using Domain mapping feature	No support to Javascript Footer ads from google	9/10
Google Pages	Simple look Easier maintenance Traditional single content web pages	Google stopped developing Google pages and focusing on Google sites	6/10
Live Office	Professional designs Simple footer ads from Microsoft Integrated sitemap ASP.net pages Integrated search engine	Not available for all local domains	9/10

E Mail Service:

                  Who don’t want email for their domain. Every one wants…. Well, there are two options for free.

Service Provider	Pros	Cons	My Rating
Google Mail	It’s Gmail! Contact sharing with in entire domain E mail up loader software from Google allows you to upload entire your outlook contents to E mail.	No support for folders. Closed membership, admin has to invite	10/10
Hotmail	It’s hotmail Availability of open membership option	No integration of IM (Microsoft release they will be releasing new version soon)	8/10

Blogging:

                 After, home page and email the next look is for blogs.

Service Provider	Pros	Cons	My Rating
Blogger	It’s just blog spot Excellent maintenance of post structure Any user can have their own blog as a sub domain	Admin has to create DNS records for each user’s blog. Not automated process	9/10
Live Spaces	It’s Live spaces	Only one blog can be created, but address bar won’t retain the domain path once page opened	7/10

IM:

                 Instant messaging service although not required for a domain with less users, it is very good feature for schools and enterprises.

Service Provider	Pros	Cons	My Rating
Google Talk	It is Google talk All Gmail powered users can be added as buddies Online storage of conversations Easy to use	No rich text support for chatting No webcam support	9/10
MS Messenger	It’s Microsoft messenger Complete rich text support	No online storage of conversations	7/10

Calendar:

               Google, is winning this race comfortably based on fact that Microsoft has no calendar service for domains.

Service Provider	Pros	Cons	My Rating
Google Calendar	It’s Google calendar Integration with Google mail for domains		8/10

Documents:

                 Both Microsoft and Google are competing in this area.

Service Provider	Pros	Cons	My Rating
Google Docs	It’s Google docs Open document format support Created can be documents can be placed in Google sites with out copy and pasting content, thus preserving format. Support for PDF files too	No support for MS Office 2007	8/10
Office Live	It’s web based version of MS office Integration with MS Office 2007 desktop version	No support for PDF files to upload in to office live	9/10