Affiliate Disclosure

Most sites that teach beginners how to build a website are funded by sending those beginners to a particular tool. That funding model quietly shapes the teaching: the route that pays becomes the route that gets recommended. This course is built the other way round, and this page exists so you can check that claim rather than trust it.

What earns, and what doesn't

Two companies in the entire course have a referral arrangement with us. Every other tool named across all ten lessons — the static hosts, the code editors, the open-source projects, the registrars, the page builders — pays us nothing at all, and several of them are the tools we point at most often. If a lesson tells you a free option is the right answer, and it usually does, nobody is paying for that sentence.

Where a commission does exist, it costs you nothing extra: the company pays it out of its own margin, and the price you see is the price you would have paid arriving cold.

Why nothing here is ranked

You will not find a "best website builder" table on this site, and that is a deliberate structural decision rather than an oversight. Ranking tools is where education turns into selling, because the ranking has to come down somewhere and the commission is always pulling. Lessons name tools as examples of a category and then hand the decision back to you — the decision framework is the closest this site comes to a recommendation, and it routes plenty of people to options that pay us nothing.

How the links work

Affiliate links on this site never point straight at a tracking URL. They point at a short address on our own domain beginning with /go/, which forwards you to the company. That keeps the lesson text readable, lets us change a partner without editing a dozen pages, and means every commercial link is marked in the page's own markup as sponsored so search engines and screen readers can tell what it is.

If you would rather not pass through it, type the company's name into your browser instead; the lesson still works and we would rather you learned the thing than clicked the link. If you ever find a recommendation on this site that only makes sense if somebody is being paid, tell us — that is a bug, and it gets fixed.