No experience needed

robin fay, Contributor

You may have heard some buzz about something called social networking. Perhaps, even Web 2.0? Semantic web? Web 3.0? Maybe not? Well, no worries, we won't be talking about the theories of those in this article, because we are starting out with the basics. The FREE basics. The easy basics. If you can click and type you are halfway finished.

GOT E-MAIL?
First you need email. Don't have it? Check out , gmail, or hotmail. All free to anyone. You actually can read any of those accounts at most libraries (for those who don't have a personal computer). You'll need an email address for the rest of the fun toys.

GOT A FREE ONLINE GALLERY?
Imagebucket is okay for free image hosting, but Flickr offers some very nice (and FREE!) features. Even though it is easy to use, they have lots of help and support. Flickr also provides opportunities to network with other artists (as well as your friends and family!) as well as free little tools that you can include on ....

YOUR FREE WEBSITE?
Whoa, you may think. Don't I have to pay for that? Umm. No. There are free services out there and we'll break down what they are:

A "regular" website.
A regular website is one where you can put up some photos and write a bit about yourself all by typing and/or clicking. It doesn't have to be maintained regularly. Google pages is the new free webpage project from guess who (yep!); Yahoo Geocities has been around for a long time. You will receive an url which you can then use to promote your site.

A Blog
A blog is a website that is meant to be updated regularly and is usually organized chronologically. Once you setup an account (blogger.com (now owned by google), wordpress.org are two great spots), the site works much like a word processor (Word) in that you type and save your entries which are then posted. Many artists use blogs to post news, works in progress, that sort of thing. Blogs are excellent and easy tools for those who want to add lots of content to a website. If you are not going to create entries regularly (post), choose a different type of website.

Myspace/Facebook/Yahoo360/Beebo
These sites fall under that social networking thing (we'll talk more about that in later articles). You create a login and then create a site. The great thing about these sites is that you can add friends (or perhaps, fellow artists!), post pictures, create a blog, and many other features. The bad thing is that most of these are full of advertisements and very hard to template beyond ugly. Still, for networking, a useful tool.

GET YOURSELF OUT IN THE ARTS WORLD ONLINE
Deviantart is a huge arts site. WWAO is a large network of women artists. Absolutearts and many more, places to network online.

The bottom line is that in this day and age, every professional should have a website. For artists that includes a place to post exhibit news, promote artwork, and post images. Whether you want to actually sell works online (ebay, etsy, cafepress, zazzle, is up to you... but you need to be out on the web somewhere.

NOTE: Free sites generally make their money with advertisements, so although they are free, you will have to put up with ads to varying degrees. Because you know nothing in life is completely free, right?

-- robin fay is an artist, web designer, web junkie and serves as the editor of moonshine.

An archive of robin's articles is located here.

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