Shameless-Advertising was created as a way for website owners to advertise their non-commercial sites free of charge.
In addition, we offer a limited number of premium advertising spots in order to pay for the cost of hosting.
About
Link Dump
When promoting your site, it is a good idea to have a short, easy to remember URL. We recommend that you purchase a domain name (in many cases they are less than $10 a year) and either use it as a redirect or purchase hosting to go with it.
We use GoDaddy for our registration, but there are others like MyDomain.com, Register.com and Domains@Yahoo.com.
For hosting, we use Dreamhost (we also offer a $50 discount if you use us a referrer (promocode: SHAMELESS) plus you get a free domain.) Pretty sweet, no?
There are many other hosts out there as well, like 1and1 and Doteasy, both of whom we have used in the past.
For cheaper, or free, alternatives, try looking for sub-hosting. Many people with their own hosting and extra space offer cheap or free hosting on a sub-domain (a.k.a. subdomain.domainname.com). If you just want to host your blog, there are places like Blogger and WordPress.
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Remember to use the promocode: SHAMELESS if you want the $50 discount.
A good layout is important when you want to draw visitors. It doesn't have to be fancy-shmancy with bells and whistles, but you do want to have a neat, clean layout with clear navigation and interesting visuals.
There are many places to learn the html and css necessary to achieve a decent layout. LissaExplains has been around for years and is where many of us learned our first tidbits of HTML. You can also try W3schools, University of Texas Page, and HTML.net.
If you think you are hopeless (or you're just lazy), you can find many good, free, basic layouts online. Try Code-Sucks.com, Gliss.com, BlueRobot, CssCreator, and Layout-O-Matic.
As for graphics, we are firm believers in creating your own. But to start you off, here are some free resources Squidfingers (patterns), BackgroundCity (backgrounds), stock.xchng (stock images). You don't need a fancy image program to make nice graphics, you can get THe GIMP for free.