Go live in an hour

Live beats perfect, by an infinite margin

This is the lesson where "I don't have a website" stops being true.

You will paste yesterday's copy into a free builder and press publish. The result will not be perfect. It will be live, which beats perfect, because a live page can be measured, improved and pointed at — and a perfect page that doesn't exist can't do anything. Everything after this module — content, search, email, ads — needs a URL. After today you have one, and it cost €0.

Set a 60-minute timer before you start. The time-box is not a stunt; it's protection. Given unlimited time, a page builder becomes a procrastination engine — there is always another template, another shade of blue. Your copy is written. The design decisions left are small, and the timer keeps them small.

One honest note before the tools: free tiers change. Prices and limits below were correct at the time of writing; the principle — publish for €0 today, pay only when the page earns it — does not change.

The recommended path: Carrd

Carrd is the default for this Program, and for reasons beyond price:

• The free tier publishes instantly at yourname.carrd.co — up to three sites per account.
• It is one-page by design. You cannot sprawl into an About page and a News page, which quietly enforces Lesson 4.1's one-action principle.
• The templates are good enough to ship. Pick one close to your structure and replace text block by block.

The honest limits: on the free tier there are no forms and no custom code — so no embedded form and no analytics script. Both unlock with Carrd's Pro Standard tier at roughly €17–19 a year, the cheapest paid step in this entire Program, and optional today: the workaround below covers the form, and Lesson 4.5 covers measuring without a script. A custom domain also needs a paid tier; more on why that can wait below.

Two alternatives

Framer (free tier). More polished, more layout control, publishes at yourname.framer.website with a small Framer badge. The learning curve is real — it is a design tool that will happily eat your hour. Choose it when visual craft is genuinely part of the brand argument, as it is for a product like Ostara's. Forms and custom code sit behind paid site plans (from roughly €5–10 a month).

Google Sites (free, no catches). The plainest output of the three, and the only path with a genuinely free embedded form: a Google Form dropped straight into the page. No submission limits that matter, no badge, no upsell waiting. Entirely respectable for a service business, and the fallback when a workplace IT policy blocks everything else.

Already have a website? Then don't use a builder — create one new page in whatever the business already runs (WordPress, Shopify, Wix) and give it the one job. The exercise accepts any publicly reachable URL. But note the trap Lena hits below: a website you can't touch is the same as no website. If every change queues behind a developer, a builder page is your unblocking move, not an admission of defeat.

The €0 form workaround

Your CTA needs somewhere to go. On free tiers without forms, link the button to a free form or booking tool instead of embedding one:

• Tally — free tier with unlimited forms and submissions at the time of writing; clean, GDPR-conscious, two minutes to build.
• Google Forms — free, unlimited, unglamorous, fine.
• Booking conversions — a free Cal.com or Calendly link if your macro conversion is an appointment or call; both free tiers handle a single event type.
• Selling? Link the button to your existing shop or checkout — don't rebuild commerce in a page builder.

The visitor clicks your button and lands on the form. Slightly less elegant than an embedded form; costs nothing; converts fine. Upgrade later if the page earns it.

Subdomain now, domain later

herzog-physio.carrd.co is fine for this module. A custom domain costs around €10 a year and becomes a should-have before you run paid ads in Module 9 — paying per click to send people to somebody else's subdomain is where it starts to hurt. Before then, nobody who matters is judging your suffix. Don't let a DNS afternoon eat your publishing hour.

The publish checklist

"Live" means all five, not the first one:

1. Copy pasted in full — all seven blocks from Lesson 4.2, none "coming soon".
2. CTA linked and tested end-to-end — click your own button, fill your own form, receive your own confirmation.
3. Opened on your own phone — not the builder's phone preview; your actual phone, on mobile data if you can.
4. One other human confirmed it loads — send the URL to anyone; "loads and I understood it" is the bar.
5. Basic decency while pasting — headlines as real text, not images; alt text on the images you add; don't fight the template's contrast. Lesson 4.4 audits this properly; doing it now while pasting costs nothing.

Sandbox students, one more: your page must carry the line "Built for [business], a School of Net Marketing case business." Fiction stays labelled as fiction — everywhere, always.

Forty-one minutes on a Sunday

Tomas Herzog, Sunday evening, kitchen table — his standing three marketing hours. Timer on.

Minutes 1–6: Carrd account, template chosen — closest match to his block structure, not the prettiest. Minutes 7–28: yesterday's copy pasted block by block; two template sections he has no content for get deleted rather than filled — one page, one job. Minutes 29–36: a free Tally form — name, phone number, what hurts, preferred clinic location, plus a one-line data-use note (Lesson 4.4 explains it) — and the button wired to it. Minutes 37–41: test booking submitted from his own phone, confirmation received, URL sent to his receptionist, who replies "loads, and I'd book the Check-up". Publish. herzog-physio.carrd.co, live in 41 minutes, total spend €0 — and the clinic's first way to book at 22:00 on a Sunday.

Lena takes 70 minutes in Framer — the extra half hour mostly spent resisting Framer's invitation to redesign. Her CTA doesn't go to a form at all: it links to Storkflow's existing trial signup, tagged ?src=lp so trial starts from this page can finally be counted. Her blocker note reads: "our real site needs an engineer for every comma — this page needs nobody's permission." That sentence is the lesson.

Your timer starts now.

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