Dreaming of starting a website but you do not have money to pay for web hosting and domain?

Well, uCoz is one of the platforms that offers a free web hosting with built-in content management system. Here, you can create your own fully featured website without spending a dime.

Create a portfolio, a blog, a news site, a shopping platform, and more – and everything is for free. That’s uCoz. If you’re interested to learning how, here’s the complete guide to creating a fully functional website with uCoz.

What is uCoz?

uCoz is Russian-based online platform that allows you to create a website, online shopping, blog, web forum and more for free.

Data shows that as of 2015, more than one and a half million sites were created via the platform. While it is Russian-based, it supports the English language and account creation is open to non-Russian citizens.

It is an award winning platform. In fact, it has won several awards which include Open Web Awards 2009 winner, People’s Ten in Runet Prize 2008, Technologies and Innovations in Runet Prize 2009, Content Management Award Winners 2009, and Best for Ecommerce in Web Host Directory September 2008.

How to Create an Account with uCoz

Account creation with uCoz is very easy. Read on to find out how to make yours.

To create an account , go over to the website through the link https://www.ucoz.com/. Thereafter, click create a website.

Go to the sign-up page where you’ll either have to create an account via (a) email and password, or (b) Google sign-in.

It will ask for your mobile number, key in, then proceed.

Then, you will be asked to put your preferred web address. You can choose from subdomains usite.pro, ucoz.site, ucoz.net, ucoz.org and more. For this tutorial, I will choose readthiswell.usite.pro.

Click your newly created site below, to go to the control panel.

Website Types and Plan Upgrades in uCoz

In the admin panel, there are plenty of options to choose from. You can either create an online shop, telegram bot store, subscriptions and plans, landing page/promo site, news/articles, portfolio, educational, choose the fitting one, or all modules. Here, I am going to create a news/article website (but you can always choose the other options).

Upon clicking the preferred site type, the panel will ask for a site name, I will name it Read This Well, then click Create a Website. Later, it will ask to link your phone number for security purposes (option is yours).

Notably, uCoz is very generous by providing 400mb of storage space for the free plan. You can always upgrade. Here’s a screenshot of the plans.

Designing Modules for uCoz Webite

Let us start studying the design modules for uCoz website. Click the design tab.

On the left, you can see the active modules. These are users, page editor, site news, publisher, site search and SEO module. Click the item to edit. Likewise, there are more modules you can activate by going to the inactive section and start activating them. Some inactive modules you might want to have on your site are forum, file catalog, blog, photo albums, games, chat box, and online forms. (in this tutorial, we will focus on the active modules).

Users

The users module includes the list of site users, user groups (administrator, moderator, etc), module settings, social login, user ranks, and other settings regarding users of the website.

Page Editor

The website page editor includes page management, file manager, general settings, and module design customization.

Under page management, you can add new pages or customize existing ones. Ensure to have Home, About, and Contact as pages as these are necessary for a functional website.

Click the edit icon to customize the page design. You can change the page name and content. By default, you are editing via HTML code panels. While HTML editing provides more customization, you can also choose the Visual Editor to edit like a regular office document.

Above is editing with HTML code panels, below is by using the Visual Editor.

Add default loader or featured image. Other options are available such as making page content temporarily unavailable, applying personal template to the page, replace external links with u.to URL shortener, update page in site menu, and selecting user groups having access to the page.

Site News

Site news refers to the news articles published on your website. Options are entry management (allows you to add new or edit existing news articles), categories management, zen, customize filters, module settings, and module design management.

Most options under entry management are similar to page management under page editor. New options are adding tags and categories.

Site news page for our website is accessible at https://readthiswell.usite.pro/news/.

In addition, you can also add new entries by visiting the news page. The option is available if you are logged in to your uCoz account.

Publisher

Same options in the site news module.

Site Search

In the site search module, you have the following: URLs of sitemap files, module settings, and module design management.

The URLs of Sitemap files provides a list of sitemap urls you can provide to search engines for site indexing.

Sitemap will permit search engines to index your website quicker and more qualitatively. Sitemap files are updated automatically, approximately once a day (depending on how often the website is updated). URLs of Sitemap files are written in the default robots.txt file, which we advise you not to change.

Definition on uCoz website

Module setup allows you to set the number of posts per page, maximum number of search results, modules to search in, maximum number of characters in results description, make the search by tags default, supplement search results by tags with the results of the site search, and sort the search results by tags.

SEO Module

The SEO module comprises of specifying unique titles, descriptions, keywords for modules, categories, and posts as they appear on search engines. Moreover, the ability to set URLs manually, redirects, and Yandex services. Yandex is the largest search engine in Russia.

Why You Should Start Creating a Website with uCoz

Creating an account with uCoz and publishing blog entries is very easy. With 400 mb of free storage space, you can do a lot. The subdomain provided for free looks professional, hence you can send your blog URL to friends with pride.

The professional subdomain it provides is one of the reasons why I would choose uCoz over other free web hosting.

The learning curve with design, customization, and other technical details requires time to fully utilize and understand. Terms in the modules and how they are arranged is different from other platforms I have used. Reason perhaps, is that it is Russian-based and hence they have different taste of design and terms.

However, if you are really looking to create a website that has a professional subdomain (something you’re proud to share), with lots of promising design options, and generous storage space – uCoz is right for you.