Where to start

You've bought a template — or you're still thinking about it. This is an overview of the whole journey, from a downloaded file to a site running on your own address with mail arriving at it. One page, so you know what you're getting into before you dig into the detail.

~1 hour in total
from ~€12/year
no coding

What's ahead

1 Fill in your content: Double-click configurator.html, add your text, colours, logo and photos. A live preview shows you how it will look. At the end you press a button and get a finished website.; ~30 min · €0
2 Put the site on a host: Drag one folder with your mouse. No programs, nothing to install. The site is live on a temporary address straight away.; ~10 min · €0
3 Connect your own domain: Buy the address the site will live at — and this is where the one decision worth thinking about gets made. More below.; ~15 min · ~€12/year
4 Switch on your email: So that mail reaches info@yourdomain.com — and so you can reply from that address too.; ~15 min · €0–36/year

Steps 1 and 2 are within anyone's reach

Genuinely. If you can unzip a file and drag a folder, you'll have a site online in half an hour. Step 3 is the first thing you'll be doing for the first time in your life — and step 4 is the one people forget.

One domain, two paths

This is the one thing worth understanding. A domain is only a name — and in DNS it branches into two completely separate paths. The website goes down one record, the mail down another, and each can end at a different provider. That’s why free hosting gave you no mailbox: its job ends at the upper branch. And it’s why the recommendation below works — buy the domain where the mail will live and the provider sets that lower branch for you, so you never touch DNS at all.

What it costs altogether

Three items, nothing else. The columns are the two routes described below.

Item	Cheapest	Best
Web hosting Cloudflare Pages	€0	€0
Domain your address	~€12/year	~€12–20/year
Email on your own domain	€0	~€12–36/year
Total per year	~€12	~€25–55

The one difference between those columns

In the cheap column the email is free because it's forwarding — mail to info@ reaches you, but you can't reply from that address. Your customer gets the answer from your private address.

The more expensive column is a real mailbox. So the whole difference between the two columns comes down to one question: will I be answering customers from that address? If yes, the cheap column isn't for you.

If you'd rather not decide, do this

This is what we'd recommend to a tradesman who doesn't want to spend an evening on it. It isn't the cheapest by a few euros, but it has the fewest places to go wrong.

Buy the domain from a provider who also sells mailboxes — and order the mailbox with it. Namecheap, Infomaniak, Porkbun, Hostinger, IONOS or GoDaddy worldwide; Hover or Squarespace Domains in North America; 123-reg or Krystal in the UK; Strato or Hetzner in Germany; OVHcloud or Gandi in France; TransIP, Antagonist or Vimexx in the Netherlands; Aruba in Italy. It costs €1–3 a month and the provider sets the MX records for you.
Put the site on Cloudflare Pages. Free, no traffic limit, and when someone writes about you one day, the site will take it.
Connect the domain to the site following the guide — it's one record and the host walks you through it.
Send yourself a test message in both directions and check the spam folder too. Done.

Around €30–50 a year in total, and you never touch anything you don't understand.

If you already pay for hosting

Then buy nothing. You almost certainly have mailboxes included, and the site can go where you already pay. See route C in the hosting guide.

Four guides, for when you reach the detail

Each covers one thing, and you read it when you're at that thing. Not before.

Which photos to upload

What shape belongs where, why not to shrink photos first, how to write a description, and why location data has to come out of them.

at step 1

Page addresses

How to choose a good page address, why not to change it once it's published, and what to do when you rename or remove a page.

at step 1 and when changing things

Get your site online

Cloudflare, Netlify and FTP step by step, connecting the domain, DNS, and what usually goes wrong.

at steps 2 and 3

Email on your own domain

Forwarding or a mailbox, where to buy the domain, and the three records that decide whether your mail avoids the spam folder.

at step 4

Or leave it to us

If reading this has told you that you'd rather not do it, that's completely fine — and much better to find out now than after buying. It isn't about being capable; step 3 is simply something you're doing for the first time and were never taught.

We can do it for you: take the template, fill it with your content, put it on a host, connect the domain and hand it over finished. Write to support@maxitemplates.com and tell us what you have.

And one thing to keep safe

When you finish the configurator in step 1, you get a file called my-website.json along with your website. Look after it. It's the one thing in the package that can't be made again — and it's what lets you open the configurator six months later, load it, and carry on where you left off.