website

Adsense ready website

2008-01-14T21:33:00.001-08:00

accounting	http://www.mediafire.com/?2cbj7gjumiw
acne	http://www.mediafire.com/?6mymgk24erg
adsense	http://www.mediafire.com/?9gvbyzlxxew
advertising	http://www.mediafire.com/?a1yfmpjjltd
aerobics	http://www.mediafire.com/?1jcmu4zmxdx
affiliate	http://www.mediafire.com/?3eubozmxkmu
alternative	http://www.mediafire.com/?ev4u12nam92
articles	http://www.mediafire.com/?51jgtmdcbot
attraction	http://www.mediafire.com/?5ntlnwtdrzi
auctions	http://www.mediafire.com/?8todwcdmbdg

More sites will be available soon.

Thank you for visiting this blog

New Adsense Ready Websites

2008-01-13T22:26:00.001-08:00

accounting	http://www.mediafire.com/?2cbj7gjumiw
acne	http://www.mediafire.com/?6mymgk24erg
adsense	http://www.mediafire.com/?9gvbyzlxxew
advertising	http://www.mediafire.com/?a1yfmpjjltd
aerobics	http://www.mediafire.com/?1jcmu4zmxdx
affiliate	http://www.mediafire.com/?3eubozmxkmu
alternative	http://www.mediafire.com/?ev4u12nam92
articles	http://www.mediafire.com/?51jgtmdcbot
attraction	http://www.mediafire.com/?5ntlnwtdrzi
auctions	http://www.mediafire.com/?8todwcdmbdg

More sites will be available soon.

Thank you for visiting this blog

Choosing a Money Making Website Theme or Niche

2007-12-23T21:19:00.007-08:00

Choosing a Money Making Website Theme or Niche

The choice of your website topic or theme is crucial. There are three aspects to consider when choosing a money making website theme or niche:

Are people spending money in this area?
Can you reach the target market easily and cheaply?
How much competition exists in the market and how strong is it?

Are People Spending Money in this Market

People spend money on many things. On some things they are willing to spend more than others. There are many people who would never dream of spending $200 on an educational course but wouldn't think twice about spending the same amount for a golfing day, football match, or a rare tropical fish.

Some market areas are easier to make money from than others (fashion, makeup, perfume, jewellery, most hobbies. Some areas are almost impossible to make money from (poetry, free software, classical music).

If you are unsure then ask your friends if they buy products in this area. Go to you local shopping centre and see if there are any shops selling similar products or services and are they doing well.

In most cases it is usually fairly obvious if you are unsure then err on the side of caution and assume no.

Can You Reach the Target Market Easily and Cheaply.

There is no point targeting a market that you cannot reach easily and cheaply. In our case because we are going to target the online market that means can we reached them easily and cheaply by using online methods.

The main online methods in order of cost and preference (mine) are:

Search Engines
PPC (pay per click - Overture, Google Adwords etc)
Ezine Advertising.

Regardless of which method you choose and most people will combine all three. The target market must be Internet users and they must be searching for your chosen product/service on the Internet.

Again this is usually fairly obvious - you just ask yourself how you would go about finding your chosen product or service. It is also very easy to find out using the site build it brainstorming tools and other web tools, and is covered in later in niche market research.

How Much Competition Exists in the Market and How Strong is it?

Once you are satisfied that your chosen theme has customers willing to spend money and also are reachable using online methods its time to move on to website theme research.

Website theme research is where you determine, in more detail,the level of likely demand and the strength of the existing competition.

All of these aspects including building the website are covered at Niche Websites- A complete guide to building a niche website

Choosing A Website Domain Name Part 1 Top Level Domain Name

2007-12-23T21:19:00.005-08:00

Choosing A Website Domain Name: Part 1
Top Level Domain Name

The first stage of choosing a domain name is deciding on the Top Level Domain Name or as you commonly see it written - TLD. This involves deciding on whether you will use a generic or non geographic TLD like .com, .net ...or a geographic TLD like .uk, .de.

When choosing a TLD you will be choosing from existing standard names. You cannot make up your own TLDs -see Top Level domain names for more details.

There are 2 to 3 stages involved in choosing a domain name:

Choosing the Top Level Domain (TLD) Extensions

For businesses the most obvious choice and the preferred one is a .com domain name. For example, assume you wanted to use JUICE as part of your domain name then you would try to register juice.com but it was already taken then juice.biz would be a logical alternative.

However ,before using an alternative to .com most businesses look for alternative names like fruit-juice.com and only use the .biz,.net or .org alternative TLDs when there are no other logical alternatives.

If you do not need to attract customers from outside your own country or you are offering something country specific then a geographic domain name is the best choice.

For example a Website specialising in Fruit Juice for the UK market would use an .uk TLD. If however, your Website were to offer Fruit Juice in many countries then you would choose a non-geographic like .com.

Country/Geographic Domain Names (.uk, .de etc)

If you are specifically focused on a particular country then always use a country TLD. Almost all search engines currently give a weighting to local content and are expected to attach more weight in the future as local search becomes more popular.

This means that a search engine would give .uk websites preference for a search on 'website services' from a browser (user) in the UK. Therefore if you are servicing/selling predominately to the uk market then your TLD should indicate that.

Second Level Names For Geographic TLDs

However, if you use a geographic TLD like .uk then the second level represents an area. The most common second level UK name is .co.uk (UK equivalent to .com) . Other choices are available like:

See http://www.nic.uk/ for more details

Your Website Domain Name

Taking into consideration the extra level for geographic domain names then the general domain name format becomes:

www.mywebsite.com or www.mywebsite.co.uk

Where I've highlighted the effective Top Level domain name - TLD.

Here we are going to choose the second level of the domain name- in our illustration the mywebsite name. For this part of the name you have full control, as you make it up yourself. Your only restriction being that it has not already been taken. We will consider the options in Choosing a Domain Name- Part 2.

Related Articles and Resources:

Domain Names A Guide to Choosing a Domain Name

2007-12-23T21:19:00.003-08:00

Domain Names
A Guide to Choosing a Domain Name

Every website has a domain name. Choosing a domain name is one of the first steps in establishing a website. However deciding on the domain name requires that you understand the basics.

Some websites have unique domain names while others share them with other websites. The domain name identifies your website on the Internet and looks something like this www.mywebsite.com.

Domain Names and Websites

A domain name usually corresponds to a website, but doesn't have to. When you buy a domain name you don't buy a website, you only buy a website name.

To use an analogy: Imagine a room full of boxes and a bunch of sticky labels. You buy your label (domain name) and then you buy a box (website or website host) and then you attach your label to your box, effectively linking the domain name to the website or website host.

It's possible to place multiple labels on a box, in the same way a website can have multiple domain names. Therefore www.mywebsite.co.uk and www.mywebsite.com can both point to the same physical website.

Sharing a Domain Name

In addition to seeing websites with addresses like www.mywebsite.com you may have also seen websites with addresses like :
www.yahoo.com/~mysite or mysite.yahoo.com .

There are many different variations on the format for name sharing but the ones given above are the most common. In both cases the domain name yahoo.com is being shared .

Using this kind of domain name is common for personal or hobby sites (but see below) and is usually included in most ISP connection packages along with web hosting space - see making a free website.

Your Own Domain Name

One of the most common questions I get asked is do I really need my own domain name?

If you have a business or club website then you need to have you own domain name. Even if you have a personal or hobby website then your own domain name add more credibility.

The main reason people give for not having a domain name is cost! However domain names are relatively cheap to buy (<$16) and there are many domain name providers to choose from.

What is the Best Domain Name

There are several choices you will have to make when deciding on your domain name . In order to understand these choices you need to understand the basic structure of a domain name.

Firstly a domain name consists of three elements separated by dots. The elements (using www.mywebsite.com) are:

www - convention for the web host/server
mywebsite - second level domain name
com --- top level domain name or TLD

The domain name is really : mywebsite.com and not www.mywebsite.com (
For more detail the technical structure is explored in understanding domain names).

Therefore deciding on a domain name is a matter of:

Related Articles and Resources:

Editing Meta Tags

2007-12-23T21:19:00.001-08:00

Editing Meta Tags

Meta tags are hidden tags that are located in the head section of an HTML page.

<html>
<head>
..............Meta tags go here
</head>
<body>
........Visible Page Content goes here
</body>
</html>

Almost all WYSIWYG web page editors insert meta tags into a new document. If you open a new web page with Microsoft FrontPage then this is what you see if you examine the HTML (meta tags are highlighted).

The only familiar tag is probably the title tag. You should notice that the meta description and keyword tags as discussed in meta tags explained are completely missing.

If you save the web page Frontage will prompt for a title but nothing else.

It is possible to edit the meta tags by right clicking the page and selecting page properties. This is not however obvious and you must supply the meta tag names yourself.

This behaviour is not peculiar to FrontPage. None of the Web Page editors that I have tried handle meta tags well. Therefore, I always hand edit the HTML to change the Meta Tags.

Web Page Templates and Meta Tags

All web designers use a website template and all web pages are built using this template. Therefore the first thing I do is to edit the template to contain the Meta tags I want.

Important Note: Because the template will be used to create other web pages it is important that it is valid HTML or XHTML. Therefore I would recommend that you get it validated.-validator.w3.org

Here is the template for this site showing the Meta Tags.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Making a Website</TITLE>
<META Name="Description" Content="Making a Website ">
<META Name="Keywords" Content="Making a Website ">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<style>
@import url(makingwebsite.css);
</style>
</HEAD>

You should notice that the title, description and Keyword tags are present. Other tags are also present shown highlighted in green. The meta tags highlighted in green will be the same for each page and require no further editing. The Meta tags shown highlighted in yellow must be changed for each web page.

The most common mistake people make with Meta Tags is making them the same on each page. Every web page should have it's own title, description and keywords.

Therefore when making new web pages I open the template enter the content as normal and save it using a new file name. Once finished my last job is to view the HTML source and edit the meta Title, description and keyword tags.

Note: Most web page editors don't do spell checking when in HTML or view source mode so you need to be careful with your spelling.

How to Make a Website Using Templates Video Tutorial Series

2007-12-23T21:18:00.005-08:00

How to Make a Website Using Templates Video Tutorial Series

Overview

The screenshot below shows the template files for a free template I downloaded from http://www.openwebdesign.org/

You should notice that there is only a single HTML file (index.html) and a few images in the image directory along with the style sheet.

The first thing to note is that in the example I'm using here we only have one page the Index.html.

This page will after the necessary modifications be used as the template to create all other site pages.

You should also note that most of the text on the page is for illustration purposes so you can see how a list, form etc will look.

There are 4 main areas that will need changing.

Header section and header menu
Left Navigation
Body Text
Footer

To understand the video you should have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS. Please remember to make copies of the template in case you make a mess of the original.

The editor I will be using in the videos is the Trellian web page editor.

Overview Video -

Modifying the Header

Modifying the SideBar

Changing the Main Content and Footer

Editing the Style Sheet

Using Website Template

Now that you have modified the template the next step is to use it to create each page in our website.

You simply open the template and then save it using a different file name.

It is always a good idea to create a few backup copies of the template in case you overwrite the original. In order to do this we require a WYSIWYG editor.

Related Articles:

Finding a Domain Name Registrar

2007-12-23T21:18:00.003-08:00

Finding a Domain Name Registrar

Having chosen a domain name and verified that it is still available you may think that you are ready to register it. Well you could do a Internet search and find the cheapest registrar and register the domain name. I wouldn't however advise it - not that I have any objections to finding a cheap domain name.

The problem with choosing a domain name registrar based solely on cost is that the domain name is only one part of the website. The other part of the package is the website hosting.

If you remember back to a much earlier article and the analogy to a room full of boxes (website hosts) and a collection of sticky labels (domain names).

You can get the boxes from anyone and the labels from anyone and all you need to do is to stick your label on your box and -hey presto a website. This is true in theory but a little more complex in practise. Therefore I always recommend buying your box and label from the same company.

In other words your domain name provider should also be your website hosting provider.

So you really need to find out about website hosting and choose your hosting provider before proceeding.

However for those who have already done that, or want to proceed anyway, maybe to reserve the domain name. Then here, for illustrative purposes only, is the procedure I went through in registering a domain name.

Own your own Domain

Make sure that the Web host will not hold you hostage to their service by exercising administrative control over your domain name. Your domain name should always be registered in your name and your Domain Name provider should only be listed as a technical contact.

Also remember that the domain is only leased and that you will have to renew the lease (usually yearly). This is normally done automatically by your name registrar but make sure you check as you don't want to loose the name because you forgot to renew it.

Domain Name Registrars and Domain Name Extension

Your choice of domain name registrar will be affected by your choice of TLD extension. Almost all domain name registrars can register .com extensions but not all can register .name or .uk extensions. I use www.1and1.co.uk for this site 1and 1 are also active in USA and Canada 1&1.com.

Related Articles and Resources:

Free Website Hosting

2007-12-23T21:18:00.001-08:00

Free Website Hosting

There a many free web hosting providers available on the Internet. The two main sources of free Website hosting are:

ISP Web space

An ISP (Internet Service Provider ) is the company that you use to access the Internet in the UK BT, Onetel, Tiscalli and FreeServe are some of the well know ones. Almost all ISPs offer free Web space (10-50MB) with your monthly subscription the domain name is a sub domain of the ISP and looks either like yourname.ISPdomain.com or www.ISPdomain.com/yourname.

They don't usually have banner ads like the free Web hosting providers and so are more suitable for clubs and private use. They offer limited service depth and tend to be limited to standard Web pages and perhaps a few standard scripts, however this doesn't need to be a problem as there are many websites that offer these.

The none personalised domain name is usually the main limitation but it can be overcome using the technique of Website forwarding.

Free Website host

Website hosting can be obtained free of cost from a variety of sources such as Yahoo!. The user does not pay for service because it is usually subsidised by banner advertising. Because such sites do not charge, they offer limited service depth and quality of service.

For example, many free services do not provide personalised domain names i.e. www.yourdomain.com. This limitation can however be overcome using the technique of Web forwarding.

Finding Free Hosting

To find a free website hosting provider just go to your favourite search engine and search for "free website hosting". Here are some excellent resources to help:

Free Online File Storage Directory
of more than 30 virtual disk space / file storage and sharing providers with detailed descriptions.

Free Web Hosting - The complete guide to free web hosting providers with reviews of offered services, including free PHP hosting, free ASP hosting, free Domain hosting, No Ads free hosting providers and more.

You may also find the articles on the pros and cons of free web hosting at this thefreecountry.com site useful.

If not there are many companies offering free hosting services. For a CNET review of the four most popular see here. The four free hosting sites are:

http://www.tripod.lycos.com/
http://geocities.yahoo.com/home/
http://www.angelfire.lycos.com/doc/zones/build.html
http://www.expage.com/

You may also find the articles on the pros and cons of free web hosting at this site useful.

Beware!

Some free hosting providers require that you transfer your domain name (if you have one ) to them. You should be very wary of this as it could potentially prove expensive.

Should you Choose a Free Website Host

If you think you may one day try to monetize your website then no. If you are running a serious personal, club, hobby site then again no. In hich case you should take a look at Website Hosts and Website Hosting Packages.

However if you are looking for a site to learn on or are just making you site for you own enjoyment the a free site is an ideal choice. See making a free website for other resources you will need.

General Guide To Choosing a Domain Name

2007-12-23T21:17:00.009-08:00

General Guide To Choosing a Domain Name

Your Internet domain name will personify your organization's presence on the Internet so you need to choose it with care.

A domain name is as important to your company's business strategy on the Internet as your company's name; motto and logo are to traditional marketing, therefore:

Make it relevant to your company, product, or project so it's easier to remember.
Keep your name short and simple if possible-around 5 characters (see keywords).
Include keywords in the name- A keyword is a word that will be used by people searching the net. If your Website is about fruit juices and you can't keep it short as it has already been taken the consider using it in a combination separated by hyphens e.g. fruit-juices.com.
Remember the Internet is global in nature, try to choose a name that has positive connotations in all languages.
Consider registering a generic name, if one that makes sense for your organization is still available. Like fruitjuice.com.
Avoid tying your name to a calendar year, unless its for a product launch.
Avoid Trademarked Names. Like coca-cola.
If in any doubt prefer a .com extension.

Related Articles and Resources:

How Not to Start a Website

2007-12-23T21:17:00.007-08:00

How Not to Start a Website

Are you planning on making your first website? Then please don't do it this way !

Buy yourself a web editing tool like Dreamweaver, Frontpage -cost >$150
Get a web hosting provider that supports 100G storage, SQL database, PHP, and anything else you can think of.-- cost >$100
Find out that Dreamweaver isn't so easy after all so you buy a book. cost >$30.
Still can't get the hang of it so you go on a course --cost >$300.
Decide you need to learn HTML so you buy another book --cost >$10.
Now your really getting going and you start making the website.
After a few weeks you have written a few pages but you're having a few doubts as it really isn't as easy as you though it would be at the start.
You manage to get the pages on the web- You're really proud!
You've submitted the site to the 2,500 search engines- it only cost $30 but the nice ad said that's all you need to do!
A few weeks go past and no one visits you're site. You try to find yourself in the search engines but no luck. You're upset!
You see an ad promising to get you on the top page in Google and Yahoo only $200. That's just what you need- You're happy again!
The nice man at the SEO company starts talking to you about "keywords" and "optimization" and "SERPs" and you get a nice warm glow. But you're not really sure what it's all about and it's starting to give you a headache anyway. Not to worry - he knows what he's doing!
He tells you it's no problem he'll get you on the first page in Google, Yahoo and MSN for the following searches.
"belly button jewellery", "Gold platted belly button jewellery" etc.
But you want to be found for --jewellery. Because that's what you sell.
He says that's not possible and you become angry!
You've had enough of this website nonsense- It doesn't work anyway!
But then you get a nice email from someone- don't know him though- he can get you 1000s of visitors. Now you're in business! It's a bit expensive but not to worry you've come this far!
Just as the ad said, the visitors start coming- This web stuff is easy! Now you're smiling.
Oh! you think- no one is buying- Now you're upset again.
But wait- You remember that other email that came the other day about emailing you're ad to millions of people.........................

Instead why not start your site this way you'll find it much easier and far less frustrating.

How to Build a Small Business Website That Works

2007-12-23T21:17:00.005-08:00

How to Build a Small Business Website That Works

Are you a small business owner looking to build a website to establish a web presence ?

Perhaps you can you answer yes to any of the following:

You are confused by the technology?
Worried by the cost?
On a budget?.. It must be affordable!
Not sure if you really need a website?
Unsure at what you can get from a website?
Don't know anything about getting online?
Not very technical and don't want to learn?
Want to learn a bit more about website development before you commit yourself?
Confused by the web hosting options?
Have already bought a website hosting package and don't know what to do with it?
Have already created a website that no one visits, and you don't know why?
Have a website that doesn't do what you want?

Currently very few small businesses have a website, and you may be unsure as to whether or not you need one. If so take a look at Does your business need a website.

Of those businesses that do many have:

Sites that can't be found by the search engines
Sites that don't capture and use email addresses
Sites that don't have a purpose
Sites that aren't maintained
Sites without any personality

Ok.. Let's go on.

There are 5 steps involved.

Plan the site - Starting a Business website..
Design and build the Site- See Small Business Website Design Considerations
Decide on the type of hosting and domain names- See Small Business Website Domain Names and Website Hosting Guide.
Promote the Site- See Website Promotion
Monitor and Maintain the Site

Website Business Owners Guide

Are you a business owner that wants a site but doesn't necessarily want to build it yourself? Having a site built by someone else may seem like the best way to go as you can forget about the web stuff but can you?

It is however still a good idea to acquaint yourself with the basics, and these are covered in Websites for business owners.

Web Site Costs

You can make a website using basic software that you should already have on your home PC or that is available for free on the Internet.
If you make the Website
yourself then it should cost
less than £100 ($200).

Related Articles and Resources

Online Business websites

What if you don't already have an existing business but are looking to start a website to build a business online.

Although this site covers the technical aspects of the process you should see my other site for details on how to research and build an online business with a niche website.

How to Make a Website

2007-12-23T21:17:00.003-08:00

How to Make a Website

Making a website isn't difficult - once you know how! But where do you start?

Do you want to build a Website, personal or business, and are looking for clear and comprehensive "how to" guidance?

Here you will discover easy to understand, step by step website making courses, articles
and tutorials designed especially for beginners, that show you how to make your own website.

6 Steps to Build a Web Site

Regardless of whether you are making a business or personal web site there are 6 main steps involved. Starting with the basics you will
learn:

How to:

Plan the website
Decide on the type of hosting and domain names
Design and build the Site- See Web site Design and Build Considerations
Promote the Site- See Website Promotion
Monetize- Even personal websites can make money for the site owner. The various methods available are covered in making money with websites.
Monitor and Maintain the Site

Website Business Owners Guide

But what if you don't want to build your own website but would rather have someone make it for you?

What do you need to know?

As with any project the more you understand what is involved the easy it is to make it a success. Therefore I would recommend that you become aware of the basics, and these are covered in Websites for business owners.

Free Website Making Course for Beginners

A Website consists of web pages, and so the first step to building a website is to be able to make web pages. This is covered in a free online basic How to make a website course which is intended for complete beginners to master the basic skills needed to build a web site.

"Imagine A Newsletter Dedicated to
Help You Make Your Own Website"- And Completely Free !- Click to Subscribe.

Popular Articles :

How to Password Protect Web Pages/Website

2007-12-23T21:17:00.001-08:00

How to Password Protect Web Pages/Website

Some parts of your web site may be private. So how do you restrict access to those web pages? The answer is to password protect those pages. Anyone who wants access is then required to enter a valid username and password in order to view them.

Membership websites either paid of free (requiring registration) typically require a password to be entered in order to view certain web pages.

However you don't need to be providing a membership website in order to require access restrictions on some web pages. You may have a family website for family members only, or a download area that you want to restrict access to.

Password Protection Methods

There are two main ways password protect is achieved

Using scripting (Usually JavaScript but php and asp can be used)
Using Server based password protection.

Using JavaScript Scripting

This type of password protection doesn't require anything special on the server but does require that the the browser support and enable JavaScript.

Generally the way these pages work is to send the user to a opening page that requires the username/password to be entered. If they enter it correctly they are then re-directed to the correct page.

They can be very simple scripts with the username and password embedded in the page but only viewable in source mode to more complex ones where the password/username is encrypted and hence more secure. You can also get scripts that support multiple users.

Here is an example of a script in action. The username is steve and the password in password. Click to reset

the example is

Here is the script that checks for the username and password I've highlighted the username and password in yellow:

For increased security you should implement it as an external script. Here is the script and form page (opens in new window). Just view the source and copy the contents, and edit as needed. There are many other scripts available here.

Although they are very simple to implement they are not really that secure as once the visitor has visited the real page he can book mark it and return without going through the login page.

There are commercial scripts available like htmlock which are designed for protecting multiple files and overcome the above problems by encrypting the web pages. These also introduce their own difficulties, as the files are encrypted and can only be edited by decrypting them.

PHP and ASP Scripts

These are similar to the JavaScript examples but instead the scripts are run on the server and hence require that the server supports that script. Each page that requires protection needs to be edited to include the script. Here is a free php script if you want to investigate further.

Server based Password Protection

This is by far the best and most secure option. However it does require that your host supports it. Your Hosting provider will provide control through a control panel where you can configure the protected directories and username/passwords.

The problem with this approach is that it requires manual setup and is only really used in a semi-static environment. Meaning there aren't many users and they don't change often. It is often used to provide access for newsletter readers (and similar) to private parts of a site. The trick to keeping it secure being to change the password regularly and notify the members by email of the password change.

For a more complex membership type system, were the visitor can create and edit his own username and password, you need a fully fledged membership site system. These are normally written in php, perl or asp and usually require database (MYSQL, SQL or access) support.

You should ensure that your host supports the necessary components before you purchase a membership system.

How to Plan your Website

2007-12-23T21:16:00.009-08:00

How to Plan your Website

Do you know why you want a website and what that website is going to do for you/your business?

The first stage in building your site is deciding What do you want the Website to Do?

This may seem a pretty obvious question but it is often a question that most website owners never seem to ask themselves. It is also probably the main reason why many website owners are unhappy with their website performance.

So before you begin make sure you ask yourself these questions.

Why do I want a website?
Will I need to update the site frequently?
Will I sell products from the website?
Will I use the website to attract new customers?
Will the website simply be a brochure for the company?
What will my website visitors expect to see?
Will I have private parts of the site?
Will I publish a newsletter?
How much am I prepared to pay?
Will I be doing it myself?

Website Research

For business Websites it is important to target the right keywords. You need to to be aware of what search terms searchers will use to find the service/product that your site offers.

Building it Yourself or Outsourcing

Once you have a general idea of what you want from your website you can then move on to the second stage of deciding who will be doing what.

As with any project you can either:

Do it Yourself or Have someone do it for you or a mixture of the two.

Generally speaking outsourcing will mainly be considered by business website owners but is an option regardless of website type- business or personal.

Outsourcing doesn't necessary just mean getting someone to do some work for you. It can, and often does, mean buying a package/service that does the work.

This is very common and even very experienced webmasters do this. As an example if you want a to establish a newsletter and your host doesn't provide one or the one it provides is inadequate you can either write one your self or use an existing autoresponder service.

Your level of expertise and how much time you are willing to commit will determine to a great extent how much you will outsource. Generally the more technically capable you are and the more time you can devote then the more you can do yourself.

Website Types

In general there are three site types:

Business Websites (includes non profit/charity sites)- For existing businesses wanting a website
Website businesses- For new website owners wanting to build a website as a business (i.e. to make money from). Although the technical details are much the same as for other site types there is an additional level of research involved in the site planning. This is covered in more detail in Building an online business with niche websites
Personal Websites- For individuals/clubs who want a site

How to Register a Domain Name

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How to Register a Domain Name

The domain registrar I used was www.1and1.co.uk who also host this website. The procedure shown consists of approximately 9 basic steps all carried out using the Web browser:

Choose Domain Name (see above).
Check if Domain Name is free (see above).
If free proceed to registration
If you have an existing account with the registrar then sign in
If you are a new customer enter your personal details i.e. name, address etc.
Choose a username and password so you can sign in latter to manage your account.
Enter credit card details.
Review order and agree registration policy of the registrar.
Receive confirmation screen and follow up via email.

The following show the process of registering a domain name The screens that you will see when doing this may not be the same but the process will be very similar. In this example only the name was registered.

If you are an existing customer there is no need to register and you use your user name and password to logon and order the new domain name. Otherwise you must register by providing your name, address and credit card details.

You may be asked to choose a user name and password at any stage between or you may be provided with one by the registrar. You are usually notified by email of the name and password. You will use this to logon and manage your domain name later on. Make sure you keep a copy of any emails.

Managing Your Domain Name

If you now connect to your Website you will probably see something similar to that displayed in figure 1 below. This is what is known as domain parking. Because you haven't told your registrar what to do with you domain name he has given you a temporary Website with a default Under Construction notice.

Most Domain Name registrars provide this facility as part of the registration fee. If they didn't then when you attempted to connect to the Website you would get a browser error message saying domain not found which tends to imply that it doesn't exist when you know that it does.

You are now in position to manage the domain .Most Domain Name registrars will provide a facility that allows you to do this via the Web called a control panel.

Related Articles and Resources:

Make Your Own Web Page Tutorial-Using and Learning HTML

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Make Your Own Web Page Tutorial-Using and Learning HTML

Learning how to make your own web page using HTML isn't strictly necessary in order to make your own website.

There are many tools (web page editors) which make leaning HTML unnecessary for making a web page.

However you will find that a basic knowledge of HTML makes it much easier to insert scripts like Google Adsense and website counters etc correctly into your web pages.

What Is A Web Page?

Web Pages are simply text pages with special formatting Tags which describe how the text appears i.e. is it bold, which font etc. This formatting is called HTML- Hypertext Mark-up Language.

Although knowledge of HTML is not required in order to make web pages you will find that learning a bit of basic HTML very worthwhile.

Furthermore there are many good free HTML editors available allowing you to make your own web pages for free.

Make Your own Web Page - An Introduction to
HTML

Here you are going to familiarise yourselves with HTML and at the same time make a Web page.

The tool we will use to make your first Web page is a simple text editor called Notepad, which is available for free on all versions of windows. I recommend you follow these exercises on your own computer.

Make Your own Web Page Exercise 1

Open Notepad and type the following:

Make Your own Web pages-for free

Save the file as my-first-web-page.txt in a directory on
your computer (e.g. C:\webs\BYO directory).

Close Notepad and then open the File my-first-web-page.txt in notepad. Notepad should display my-first-web-page.txt as shown in Figure 1 below:

Figure 1. text page displayed by notepad

What you have created is a simple text file meant to be
read by a text editor or word processor and it is displayed correctly.

Make Your own Web Page Exercise 2

Now open the file my-first-web-page.txt in notepad and change it
to the following:

<HTML>

Make Your own Web pages-for free

</HTML>

Then save the file as my-first-web-page.txt.Open the file again using notepad. Notepad should display my-first-web-page.txt as shown in Figure 2 below:

Figure 2. An HTML page as displayed by notepad

Notepad doesn't know that <HTML> is actually a formatting tag and not meant to be displayed, so it displays it as normal text.

Now save the file this time as my-first-web-page.htm and then open it again.

This time it should open with Internet Explorer. Internet explorer should display my-first-web-page.htm as shown in Figure 3 below:

Figure
3. An HTML page as displayed by Internet Explorer

Notice that the <HTML> tags are missing as the browser knows what to do with them and uses them to structure and format the text but doesn't display them.

The file extension .htm or .txt defines what application is used to open the file .txt files are opened by Notepad and .htm or .HTML extensions are opened by Internet Explorer. Lets examine this is in a little more detail.

Make your own Web pages -2

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Make your own Web pages -2

Exercise 3

Type the following into notepad and save as index.htm.

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE>Make Your own Web pages-for free </TITLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY>

<h1>Welcome to the Home page of -Make Your own Web pages-for free .</h1>

<h2>My second Headline </h2>

</BODY>

</HTML>

The above is the basic HTML skeleton structure. HTML documents actually consist of two parts the Header and the body. The Header part contains information that is not displayed by the browser such as script, Meta Tags and Cascading Style sheets. The body part contains the actual document contents.

HTML consists of a series of tags which are enclosed in Triangular brackets (< >).These tags are in pairs and are case-insensitive; that is, it doesn't matter whether you type them in upper or lower case.

Using upper case makes the tags easier to pick out in a document, but you can do whatever you like. The tags are used by the browser for formatting the page but they are not displayed.

Tags typically occur in begin-end pairs. These pairs are in the form

<tag> .... .. </tag>

Where the <tag> indicates the beginning of a tag-pair, and the </tag> indicates the end. (The dots indicate an arbitrary amount of content between the tags. The opening tags can also contain attributes which modify the tag e.g.

<body bgcolor="white">

The first and last tags in a document should always be the HTML tags. These are the tags that tell a Web browser where the HTML in your document begins and ends. The absolute most basic of all possible Web pages is:

<HTML>

</HTML>

That's it. If you were to load such a page into a Web browser, it wouldn't do anything except give you a blank screen, but it is a valid Web page. Next come the header tags <HEAD> and </HEAD>.

The header tags contain all of the document's header information like the document title and so on. They are not displayed by the browser. Between the title tags <TITLE> and </TITLE> you should have the title of your document in this case --Make Your own Web pages-for free.

This will appear at the top of the browser's title bar, and also appears in the history list of the browser and any bookmarks. If you don't type anything between the title tags or don't include the title tags at all then the browser will typically use the actual file name for the title which can be confusing.

Finally the body tags <BODY> and </BODY>, between which
you find everything that gets displayed in the browser window. So if you open index.htm using internet explorer. Internet explorer should display index.htm as shown in Figure 4:

Figure 4. index.htm as displayed by Internet Explorer

Spaces

You can place as many spaces as you want between words as HTML ignores additional spaces.

Therefore if your type in:

the extra spaces are removed

it appears in a browser as

the extra spaces are removed

If you want extra spaces you need to use the code   to denote a non breaking space. Therefore to create 3 extra spaces you enter it three times as here:

Three   extra spaces

Headings

The heading structures are most commonly used to divide sections of text. There are six levels of heading (from H1 to H6) and by default browsers will display the six heading levels in the same font, with the point size decreasing as the importance of the heading decreases. The HTML for Heading tags look like this:

<H1>Text for Heading 1</H1>

They are displayed by the browser as:

This is Heading 1
This is Heading 2
This is Heading 3
This is Heading 4
This is Heading 5
This is Heading 6

Paragraphs

A page is composed of a number of sections separated by headings, each of which is composed of one or more paragraphs. Each paragraph is composed of words, and each word of letters. The beginning of a paragraph is marked by <P>, and the end by </P>. When a browser comes across a <p> tag it starts a new line and adds some vertical white space between the last line and the new line.

Links

Links allow the reader to jump from one section of a document to another section of the document or to a new document altogether. This is shown in Figure 5 below:

Figure 5 linking in an HTML

In order to link you require two things:

The start of the link.
The destination of the link.

The start of the link is called the hotspot and it shows up in the browser as underlined and in normally in blue until it has been clicked. It is designated in HTML by use of the anchor tag <A>. Unlike simple tags the anchor tag has extra attributes which specify the name of the tag (so that it can be linked to) and the destination web page or page section. The form is as shown in Figure 6:

Make your own Web pages

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Make Your Own Web Page Tutorial-Using and Learning HTML

Learning how to make your own web page using HTML isn't strictly necessary in order to make your own website.

There are many tools (web page editors) which make leaning HTML unnecessary for making a web page.

However you will find that a basic knowledge of HTML makes it much easier to insert scripts like Google Adsense and website counters etc correctly into your web pages.

What Is A Web Page?

Web Pages are simply text pages with special formatting Tags which describe how the text appears i.e. is it bold, which font etc. This formatting is called HTML- Hypertext Mark-up Language.

Although knowledge of HTML is not required in order to make web pages you will find that learning a bit of basic HTML very worthwhile.

Furthermore there are many good free HTML editors available allowing you to make your own web pages for free.

Make Your own Web Page - An Introduction to
HTML

Here you are going to familiarise yourselves with HTML and at the same time make a Web page.

Make Your own Web Page Exercise 1

Open Notepad and type the following:

Make Your own Web pages-for free

Save the file as my-first-web-page.txt in a directory on
your computer (e.g. C:\webs\BYO directory).

Close Notepad and then open the File my-first-web-page.txt in notepad. Notepad should display my-first-web-page.txt as shown in Figure 1 below:

Figure 1. text page displayed by notepad

What you have created is a simple text file meant to be
read by a text editor or word processor and it is displayed correctly.

Make Your own Web Page Exercise 2

Now open the file my-first-web-page.txt in notepad and change it
to the following:

<HTML>

Make Your own Web pages-for free

</HTML>

Then save the file as my-first-web-page.txt.Open the file again using notepad. Notepad should display my-first-web-page.txt as shown in Figure 2 below:

Figure 2. An HTML page as displayed by notepad

Notepad doesn't know that <HTML> is actually a formatting tag and not meant to be displayed, so it displays it as normal text.

Now save the file this time as my-first-web-page.htm and then open it again.

This time it should open with Internet Explorer. Internet explorer should display my-first-web-page.htm as shown in Figure 3 below:

Figure
3. An HTML page as displayed by Internet Explorer

Notice that the <HTML> tags are missing as the browser knows what to do with them and uses them to structure and format the text but doesn't display them.

Make Your own Web Page 2-->

Make your Own Web Page Part 3---->

Making a Website With Site Build_it It's Easier Than you Think

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Making a Website With Site Build-it
It's Easier Than you Think!

Are you struggling with the technical aspects of website building or simply just want to build a website with the minimum of fuss?

The traditional web hosting provider has a very technical approach to website building. As a potential website builder you purchase a hosting package that has PHP, MySQL, access to .htaccess etc. You then, using your web design tools (DreamWeaver, FrontPage), build your website.

This, I must admit ,was my initial approach ,and to a certain extent it still is. This approach does mean that you need to attain a reasonable amount of technical know how to succeed, and that is indeed the subject of this website.

An Alternative Approach

It was while I was looking for hosting packages that I came across the Sitebuild-it website. What I found different about Sitebuild-it was it had no mention of PHP, JavaScript, MySQL databases etc. None of the usual technical blurb about Gigabytes, Gigabits, Linux and MS hosting.

Instead it focused simply on building a website, or more accurately, building a website business.

You Don't Need to be a Mechanic

Do you need to learn how to be a car mechanic before you can drive a car ? .. No!.. Then why do you need to be a web expert to build a website?

It is possible to make a Website using Site build-it with the bare minimum knowledge of HTML, and no knowledge of Linux, PHP, Giga... All you really need to be able to do is to be able to cut and paste between two windows.

Site build-it ensures that your Web pages are correctly optimised, takes care of the search engine submission ,search engine monitoring etc leaving you free to concentrate purely on creating the Website content.

Is Site Build-it for Everyone?

Absolutely not! If you are interested in the technical details of making websites, or if you simple want to make a small family or personal website (less than 10 pages) then you are probably much better doing it all yourself.

However if you are more interested in building a website with the minimum technical knowledge then you can try Site Build-it for Free! and see for yourself how easy it really is.

Still have Questions?

Do you have a question about site-build-it? Will it work for you? Why not ask them either through the contact form or on the phone.

Why not read through my site build-it tutorials (below) and learn how easy it is to get your website up and running and getting traffic.

Make a Website with site build-it Tutorials

Small Business Website Domain Names

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Small Business Website Domain Names

All businesses require their own domain name.

Domain names are, in effect, like business names, and often they are they same; as in Microsoft corporation ( business name) and microsoft.com ( domain name).

Domain names like business names are decided on by the person/company registering the name. The only criteria is that the domain name cannot already have been registered.

However unlike business names, domain names have a structure as you can see with the example microsoft.com. Here you can see that full stops (dots) are used to separate the different name segments microsoft and com.

It isn't really necessary to go into the technical detail on the exact structure in order for you grasp the basics of what a domain name is. If you want to you can find more detail in domain names uncovered.

Domain Name Selection

Most people automatically think that they should have a domain name ending in .com and usually use businessname.com as the domain name. For Example if your business name is J smith and sons then your domain name would be:

Jsmithandsons.com

There is nothing wrong with this, and it is indeed a good choice. However it is not the only possibility. It is the number 1 choice for anyone with a North American based business or an International business.

However; if your business is local in nature and is located outside the USA/Canada then a geographic name like businessname.co.uk (UK ) is more appropriate.

Avoiding Domain Name Scams

Domain names are cheap costing less than $20. I have heard of small businesses paying $100 for a domain name by "so called" domain name registration companies.

Beware of any company that tries to sell you a domain name over the telephone or through the mail and charges more than $20.

Register Your Own Domain Name

There are many domain registration companies available and you should always register your own name. If it is registered on your behalf by your website designer then you should always insist that it is registered to you/ your company. The process is simple and is explained in more detail here.

Here are the registration details showing myself as the owner for one of my domain names.

Further down the form you will see 1and1 Internet ltd listed as technical support. This is the company I used to register the domain name. This is perfectly normal and what you require.

Domain Names Need Renewing

When you buy a domain name you are actually leasing it as you will need to renew the name periodically usually yearly. If you forget you lose it!!!. Therefore I recommend you choose a domain registrar that does automatic renewals on your behalf.

Domain Names and Email Addresses

You can use your domain name as an email address and most domain name registration companies provide the ability to create and manage email addresses as part of the domain name registration package.

Unfortunately many small business owners seem to miss the fact and many still advertise a yahoo, Gmail or hotmail account as their business contact when they could be using their own company domain name.

See email and websites for more details.

Domain Names and Websites

A domain name is not a website. To have website you need to have a website host . You can consider the website host to be equivalent to the company premises and just as you can change company premises and keep the same company name you can change website hosts and keep the same domain name.

However I always recommend that you use the same company for both the domain name and web site hosting. So don't buy the domain name until you have decided on a suitable hosting provider.

See Website Hosting Guide. for more details.

Starting a Business Website

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Starting a Business Website

Starting a website for your business doesn't require that you to spend huge sums of money but it does require that you spend some time researching and planning your site.

The first thing you need to decide is.. Why do you want a website?
It isn't sufficient to think that just because everyone else has one you need one as well!

When you answer the why you also will probably answer, in part.. What will the site do for your business. An example would be. My business wants a website to:

Attract new clients
Inform new and existing clients on my products, services and costs.
Allow new clients to contact my business.
Provide support for my products and services to reduce the amount of telephone call enquiries we receive.

It is important to have a general idea of what you will eventually do with the site as it can have a big impact on what type of host/design you choose.

Website Research

Your website should be based around a predominant theme. Your business does something specific and that is your obvious theme. However you may need to emphasis that theme differently to establish a successful web presence.

To do that you will need to to some basic research to find the search terms that could/are being used to search for the services/products your business offers.

You can find out how in Website Research For Small Business Websites

Your Approach

As mentioned earlier there are two main approaches to website building.

Complete Do it yourself/self build approach
Partial self build approach

In reality a complete self build is rare except for small brochure type sites. Most business website owners adopt the do what you can and outsource what you can't approach.

For Example you may not feel capable of setting up a PPC (pay Per Click) campaign but you are happy to write web pages. So you write your own web pages and outsource the PPC campaign.

You should be aware that outsourcing doesn't necessary just mean getting someone to do some work for you. It can, and often does, mean buying a package that does the work.

However -------------------------------------

You may just feel that your time is better spent in your business and that you just want someone to do it all for you. If that applies to you then you should at least be aware of what is involved.

In using Websites for business owners I look at the website building process from an outsourcing perspective.

-------------------------------------

The next step is to decide the approach you will take when building the site. See Small Business Website Design Considerations

Related Articles and Resources:

Small Business Website Domain Names

Starting a Website

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Starting a Website

Starting a website, whether it's a personal or business website, doesn't require that you to spend huge sums of money.

You don't need to start by purchasing expensive web design software packages or web server space.

Tools and skills for Starting your own Website:

Access to a personal computer.
Access to the internet. -See Internet Access methods for more details
Basic computer skills – Ability to create simple documents like letters using a word processor (Microsoft Word etc).
A Web page or HTML editor.
Basic knowledge of HTML
Basic knowledge of website terms

Recommended Approach

There are many aspects to building a website and it is easy to feel overwhelmed by all of the technology and the offers which you probably don't really understand anyway.

Start slowly and don't expect to be an expert after a week. Don't buy all the ebooks or books and spend the next 6 months reading. Begin by starting with the basics and build step by step.

There is no need to start learning the details of website promotion until you have a website to promote! There is no need to start learning about PHP or JavaScript unless you are going to write them!

Only learn what you need to learn to progress on to the next step. After 3 months you will be amazed at what you have learned.

Many websites recommend that you purchase a domain name, and web space very quickly. Most people who do this then go on to abandon their project as they struggle to get to grips with HTML, Web page editing etc.

My recommended approach is for you to build the necessary technical knowledge and skills as you need them and only purchase what you need when you are ready to proceed.

Before you actually start you need a basic understanding of the common terms so you are able to distinguish a website from a web server. This is covered in Website Basics .

Once you are happy with that you can start creating web pages and linking them together etc by following the make your own website course (available to newsletter subscribers). The course is intended to cover the technical aspects involved with building a basic website.

How Much Technical Knowledge do You Need?

It's very easy to go overboard learning the latest web technologies, just as easy as it is to be totally put off by them.

The reality is that you need very little technical knowledge and certainly no more than the average person can grasp.

Did I write this page in HTML? No of course not! Could I? Probably but it would take me days and not minutes.

As an analogy you don't need to be an electrician to learn how to wire a plug or a seamstress to sow on a button. That is the the technical level you need to be able to use HTML and other web technologies.

Persistence

Starting a website isn't difficult, but it does require time, effort and above all perseverance. You can't make your website in day, not even a week. You will definitely take many months.

Related Articles and Resources:

Site Build it Review

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Site Build-it Review

Before committing to any hosting package/website building package it is important to review and compare several products.

Here we will review Site build-it and explain the various features that make site build-it unique.

Site Build-it (SBI) is a complete web site building package. It includes many tools which you would normally buy individually, and which automate so much of your manual repetitive work.

It also includes features that aren't found anywhere else, at any price.

Everything you need to make your own website is included- including the knowledge. The site build-it courses themselves are recognized by everyone as the best material available at any price on the Internet and they are free, even if you don't buy the site build-it package.

The philosophy throughout the entire Sitesell product range is to over deliver. It is also the philosophy they encourage for your own site.

So let's review the features available in the site build-it web site package.

Brainstorming tool - Essential for making a website that has a change of succeeding. Using this tool you will research for possible website niches or themes and then do detailed research on all the profitable keywords for your chosen niche.
Domain Registration- Included in the price and handled automatically
Hosting- You website is hosted and maintained on Sitesell servers.
Web Page optimization- each web page you create is automatically optimized for the search engines before you build it. If it isn't quite right the GURU tells you and gives you advice on how to correct it. This is the next best thing to having your web pages written by a professional web page copy writer.
Graphic Tools- No need to learn how to create logos etc its all included.
Web page submission - All your web pages are automatically submitted to the major search engines and re-submitted when necessary.
Page rank reporting- comprehensive reporting on how your web pages are doing at all the major search engines
web page analysis- If your web pages are ranking well you can analysis and change to get better results.
Traffic Stats - Comprehensive reporting on visitors, page views, click through rates etc.
Link exchange program- automatically matches your web site theme with similar sites and allows you to contact the web master for link exchange.
Password protection on web pages- If you wan to create a members only area.
PPC research- If you want to use PPC search engines you can do keyword research on the major PPC engines.
Ezine Hosting- Handles Ezine subscription and distribution.
Supports pages generated using FrontPage , Dreamweaver etc- Although you don't need to use any of these web design packages for experienced web masters who do, they can still upload their web pages.
There are no limits on the number of Web pages, nor on bandwidth. No need to worry about renewing domain names -- SBI! does it automatically.
Customer Support SBI! includes 7-days-a-week, personal one-on-one customer support and excellent forum.
Web 2.0 content- Get your visitors to create your content for you.

The site build-it package is unique on the Internet. There is no other package that comes close. For example sites that have been built using site built-it then see the site build-it case studies.

Best of all ! Everything is managed through your Web browser! All you need to do is to cut and paste between windows. If you're not sure your ready for site-build-it then take a look at getting prepared for site build-it which includes a little test.

Do you have a question about site-build-it? Will it work for you? Why not ask them either through the contact form or on the phone.

Why Not try Site Build-it for Free!

Starting Guides

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Starting Guides

Building a website involves learning many new skills and techniques. It is difficult to know how much you need to know before you can proceed. Many people invest too much time learning things that they don't need to know or or don't need to know in such great detail.

In order to help overcome the confusion I have created a series of starting guides that contain just enough information to get you started in in most cases all that you really need to make your own website.

If you want to become an HTML expert then by all means do. However if you want to learn just enough HTML to make your own website then that is what my starting HTML guide is all about.

Paid Guides

The Cappuccino Guides are introductory guides for beginners but can also serve as concise summary guides costing the same as a cappuccino. They are an ideal way of getting started.

Free Guides

Blogging

Starting with Search Engines

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Starting with Search Engines

Search engines are what makes the web useable.

When you want to find information about something you go to your favourite search engine and type in a few words (keywords) and you get a list of Web sites to choose from.

You read the short description of the Web sites on the list, and click, off you go to look at that Website. If the search engine has done its job correctly you find what you are looking for.

If not you go back try a few other sites on the list or do another search using different keywords.

Notice something very important - People don't search for a particular website
- They search for a product or information to solve their current problem

When making you own Website you need to bear this process in mind. You make your website to solve a particular problem,and you make it so the search engines recognise that it solves that problem.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

A whole industry has grown up around search engines. A quick search on Google for SEO gives over 15 million results. These companies all offer to get your Website to rank high in the search engines (see website and search engine ranking) .
They will optimise your site for this engine and then for that engine, these keywords etc etc etc…

Its not surprising that anyone making their first Website feels a little overwhelmed when it comes to submitting their website to the scrutiny of the search engines.

After reading some of the Search engine articles which talk about offsite and onsite optimisation, keyword stuffing, doorway pages, white hat and black hat. You either give up completely or just hand over the money to the experts.

SEO Basics

The basics of optimising your site for search engines (SEO) is relatively straightforward as search engines use only three criteria to rank you website/ web page:

Your page/ site content -
The links to and from your site
Your Competitors

Because you have no control over your competitors sites you have only two ways of influencing your rankings, and they are:

Your Content
Website Links

Your Website Content

You have complete control over you website content and so it is the first step in website optimisation process. So lets find out how your website content affects your search engine rankings and how to choose content for a good search engine ranking.

Website Links

The links to and from your website have a great influence on the ranking of your site/pages. The general rule of thumb is that the more competitive your chosen niche then the more links (quality links) you will need to achieve a good ranking.

Google, in particular places a great emphasis on links, and it is almost impossible to rank in Google without inbound links. Links and link types are covered in Website Links .

Related Articles and resources:

Improve your Search Engine Ranking with Web Page Optimization

Make Your own Web Page - Part 3

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Make Your own Web Page - Part 3

We are now going to make links to another document and also a link to a place in the same document.

Exercise 4

Make a new page called page2.htm with the following text.

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE>Making your own Pages -Page 2</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY>

<h1>This is Page 2</h1>

</BODY>

</HTML>

Then modify the index.htm page so that it contains the following: ( tip: use cut and paste ).

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE>Home page of Making your own Website-for free </TITLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY>

<h1>Welcome to the Home page of Making your own Website-for free .</h1>

<p><a name="Introduction">Introduction</a></p>

<p>This is the first section of the page. The heading introduction is an anchor and is linked to later in the document.</p>

<h4>This is a link to a new document called <a href="page2.htm">making a free web page</a></h4>

<p>This is text contained in a paragraph and should be enclosed in paragraph tags. You can insert any text you want here</p>

<p> </p>

<p>This is a new paragraph.</p>

<p>This is a link to the beginning of the page useful for quick navigation through a long page <a href="#Introduction">Introduction</a> .This type

of link is used if the page covers more than one screen.</p>

<p> </p>

</BODY>

</HTML>

Open the file index.htm with Internet explorer the result should be as shown in Figure 7:

Figure 7: index page with a link shown in blue

This is all we need to cover in this series on HTML. You can find an updated version in Starting Html. In reality you only need a very basic understanding of HTML in order to create Web pages because the editing tool (see web page editors) takes care of the HTML coding.

Creating a Web page today is like creating a document using a word processor and most of the word processors today are capable of creating HTML or converting text documents into HTML documents.

However, in spite of this it is well worth the effort if you can manually edit an HTML Web page.

The best way to learn is to fully understand what we have done here and then get yourself an HTML book for a reference.

Web Page Names and Extensions Web Page Titles

For our home page we have used the page name index.htm. You may have seen others called index.html or home.htm. So what is the significance of these names and how do you name web pages?

This is covered in web page names and the home Page

Extensions .htm and .html

You will notice that we are using index.htm and not index.html. This is simply convention if your ISP tells you to use index.html then all of your pages should have a .html extension. If you can choose and usually you can then I prefer the .htm extension (its shorter).

<-----Make your own web Page- part2

<-----Make your own web Page part1

Useful links for learning more HTML:

Mini Websites

2007-12-23T21:14:00.003-08:00

Mini Websites

Mini Websites are typically small (1-5 page websites). The main use of mini websites is for affiliate marketing, where small sales sites (mini-sites) are specially created to sell/promote a particular product or service.

Why Mini Websites?

Most webmasters rely on search engines to deliver them free traffic and hence customers.

In the early days of the web the main source of revenue for webmasters came from affiliate programs and banner advertising.

Search engines, in particular Google, favour content heavy websites. Therefore in order to get reasonable amounts of web traffic webmasters would create large content based websites (see affiliate masters ebook).

This website building model is still practised today and is the one I and many others use. However; heavy content websites (100+ pages) take time to build.

If you have a product that has a short sales life its impractical to build a 100 page website just to promote it. Hence the birth of the mini site, which is a website constructed around either selling or promoting a single product, service or event.

Mini WebSite Problems and Solutions

The problem with these type of sites is that, because they don't have much content, they don't usually rank very well in the search engines. Therefore they cannot rely on free search engine traffic and need to be promoted by other methods - the main ones being:

PPC (pay per click) advertising
Press releases and other offline methods
Email/Ezine announcements.
Articles.

Uses and Design

The main use of mini web sites is for selling/promoting a single product , service or even event like a rock concert. They are also used for customer/product support and feedback.

They consist of a home page + optional pages

Optional pages are typically:

Order page
Contact page
Legal page
Testimonials
FAQ (frequently asked questions)

If you are new to the mini website idea then you may want to see the High performance affiliate marketing and/or the cracking the niche code ebook for more information on using mini-websites for affiliate and product promotion.

Mini Web Site Examples

Here is a screenshot of a website selling the the mini-sites-profits ebook. Notice the 4 links (red circle). This mini site is basically 4 pages home plus testimonials, contact and members.

Making Your Mini Websites

In the How to Make a Website Using Templates Video Tutorial Series I cover how to take a small website template and make your own mini website using it.

Multiple Domain Hosting For Reduced Website Hosting Costs

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Multiple Domain Hosting For Reduced Website Hosting Costs

If you are the owner of several websites then hosting multiple domains on a single hosting account is an excellent way of achieving low cost hosting without having to sacrifice quality.

What many don't realise is that generally you don't purchase a website, you purchase a hosting account.

In some cases this can only be used to host a single domain and hence a single website. In others the account can be used to host multiple domains and hence multiple websites.

Benefits of Hosting Multiple Domains

Because domains are much cheaper than website hosting accounts, choosing an account that offers multiple domain hosting is a far cheaper way of hosting multiple websites at low cost, than purchasing a hosting account for each website.

As an example the hosting provider 1and1 provider (link below)offer a simple hosting package for approx £70 per year and uk domains for approx £2.00 per year. If I have four websites then to host using:

a) separate accounts cost= £70 *4 + 4*2= £288 per year

b) A single account and multiple domains cost = £70 + £2.0 *4=£78 per year.

The saving is £210 per year.

This must be offset by the fact that each of the domains traffic is usually counted together against the single hosting account and if your websites are popular then you may exceed bandwidth and or disk space limits.

In addition you may find that the log files that are provided don't allow you to differentiate between the domains as all the traffic is counted against a single domain.

The Hosting account also has a single password and hence once logged in you can administer each domain. Therefore each domain should belong to you.

Hosting Providers that Support Multiple Domains

Because of the popularity of mini websites and website reselling there are many hosting companies that specialize in providing multiple domain hosting and offer substantial discounts depending on the number of domains you intend to host.

Hosting Multiple domains on a single account has the potential to significantly reduce your hosting costs, but as is the case for choosing any hosting provider you should be aware of what other website services you require, and choose your hosting provider accordingly.

Don't just go for the cheapest or the one that provides the most services!

Here is a short list of the ones I have found while searching the Internet. If you do this search yourself you should also try "hosting reseller" as many sell multiple domains as a reseller service.

One and one

USA

Ipower
Blue Host Web Hosting $6.95 Per Month - USA based Professional website hosting . Incredible feature rich package including Wordpress.
Anhosting- USA based Professional website hosting for $6.95 per month. Incredible feature rich package including Wordpress.
1&1 Web Hosting

Who Needs This Type of Hosting?

Anyone who requires multiple websites with their own distinct domain name should consider this type of hosting account. If you only intend to host a single domain/website then you shouldn't discard the idea as in many cases they are no more expensive than single domain hosting solutions.

This type of solution is often used by affiliate marketers who create a website for each product/service that they promote.

How it Works

If you are to implement it then you need to understand how it works. A website is basically a collection of files stored in a folder ( website layout). This website to folder relationship is the key to understanding how multiple domain hosting works.

Subdomains as an Alternative

Rather than get another domain name it is possible instead to use a subdomain of the the existing domain name in which case you don't even need to purchase a separate domain name.

However this will only work if the websites are related. Take a look a subdomains to see how they work and when they are used.

Related articles and Resources:

Need Help With Your Website

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Need Help With Your Website

Top of Form

Ask The Webmaster ! Are you struggling with certain aspects? Do you need a little help? Do you have a website and aren't getting any visitors? Want to know if your web pages are optimised ok? Want to know if you've been Indexed? Want to know which hosting package you need? I am always happy to hear from and help people who visit my website. Therefore, if you have a question why not simply ask. I cannot promise to answer your question but I will always do my best to help. Over the years I have provided many readers with free help/advise and will continue to do so. I would however ask those who receive it, and are happy with it, to consider: Buying Steve a drink Linking to the site. Here is the html code- <a href="http://www.build-your-website.co.uk/">How to make a website</a> Doing someone else a favour. Best of luck ! Steve
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Email address:
Question:
To Prevent Spam you are required to enter a validation code to confirm that you are a real person and not a machine. The code is 1234 Just enter this code in the box below before you send
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PS Don't forget to see the FAQs

Non Geographic Top level Domain Names

2007-12-23T21:13:00.007-08:00

Non –Geographic Top level Domain Names

Non –Geographic Top level Domain Names and uses
.com	– This is the most popular TLD. It is used mainly for US commercial organizations. It is the most popular domain name extension on the Internet. Anyone can have a .com, but it is more difficult to think up a unique name that hasn't already been registered. Because of this many domain name registrars offer alternative names when checking and registering a domain name.
.net	– This is the second most popular TLD. It generally describes the entity owning the domain name as a network and is used mainly by organizations that provide network connection services.
.org	In general, non-profit organizations tend to use this extension.
.gov	Generally used for government agencies. Restricted
.int	Intended to be used for sites relating to International Treaties or containing international databases. For this reason, it is not widely used. Restricted
.mil	Mainly used by military organizations of the US government. Restricted
.name	This is a new TLD extension and is intended to allow individuals to register their names (i.e. first name. Last name .name) as a personal domain name on the Internet.
.biz	– This is a new TLD extension for businesses; .biz is intended to be an alternative to the .com.
.info	– This is also new TLD, and is freely available to anyone with a business, government or non-commercial site.
.aero	– This is a new restricted TLD for service companies dealing with air travel.
.pro	– This is a new restricted TLD for professions such as law, medicine, and accounting.
.coop	- This is a new restricted TLD for cooperative organisations
.museum	This is a new restricted TLD for museums, archival institutions and exhibitions.

Some of the new TLDs (.biz, .info, .name, and .pro, .aero, .coop, and .museum) may not be currently live but you can sometimes pre-register to reserve your domain name. The following lists the most popular TLDs which are all live.

.com
.net
.org
.name
.biz
.info

Optimizing Images

2007-12-23T21:13:00.005-08:00

Optimizing Images

Almost all web pages incorporate images even if it is just the logo image.

We continue this Web Page Optimization series by looking at optimizing the page Image tag.

Why Optimize Page Images?

Search engines have in recent years added new and specialised search functionality, and now not only can you search for particular words but also for images, sounds and video.

For Examples we can search for images on Yahoo or Google here we look for images of saving private ryan.

This is what yahoo returns:

So how does yahoo Index these images? Well the only things it can index are the image name and the image alt attribute. Therefore for maximum effect you should make both the name and alt tags meaningful.

To illustrate I will show you the image declaration for the image above. The image name I have highlighted in yellow and the alt attribute contents in grey.

You should notice that they are almost identical and that they relate to the content of this page. In the example for the Yahoo search then I would have called the image- Private Ryan.... and the alt attribute would have been similar.

What is the alt attribute: The alt attribute is meant for browsers that don't display images or have disabled them. The visitor then sees the text within the alt tag. It has not been normal practise to use these attributes but using the alt attribute is a requirement of XHTML.

Related articles and resources:

Web Page Optimization- Introduction
Part 1 Optimizing title and heading tags
Part 2- optimizing the meta description and keyword tags.
Part 3- Optimizing Headlines and body content (the main page text)

Personal Domain Names

2007-12-23T21:13:00.003-08:00

Personal Domain Names

Businesses have slowly caught on to the importance of having a domain name, but individuals have not.

It hasn't happened yet but I'm pretty sure that it's only just a matter of time before every one has their own personal domain name.

I remember many years ago when personal car number plates were allowed thinking who would want one?

The answer millions of people. Not only that but they have also become collectors items.

Personal names aren't necessary real names; they could also be cartoon characters, book characters, stage names, book names. Just type in www.mickeymouse.com and see where you end up.

Why Personal Domain Names

For people doing business on the internet it is a form of branding. Many of the Internet gurus have their own domain name. For others using it purely for personal reasons.

However regardless of the reason your own domain name is very useful as once you have it you can use it for:

A website/homepage
Email

and it

belongs to you.
It is easy to remember
You can keep it the rest of your life.
You can sell it
You can pass it on

Domain names could, in the future, be the primary way people contact each other. Imagine in years to come typing a domain name into a cell phone. It isn't here yet but it is a logical step as we move to IP enabled phones (VOIP).

One of the trends mentioned in the future trends site is that everyone will have their own homepage, and if that's the case, they will need a domain name.

Choosing a Domain Name

The .Name TLD (top level domain name) was introduced specifically to cater for personal names. However, for various reasons it doesn't appear to have become popular and the .com TLD continues to be the preferred choice for many.

Individual Names and Family Names

It's possible to register a domain name for use by all the family. This is normally done by using the family surname as the domain name. For example if the family name is smith then the domain name would be

smith.com

The problem with this is that there are lots of smiths and so its unlikely that the name is still free. Rather than using numbers to pad the name to make it unique as one often sees with Yahoo and Hotmail accounts you could try

Combining husband and wife surnames either directly or hyphenated like

smithjones.com of smith-jones.com or reversed.

If that doesn't work try using the .name TLD e.g.

smith-jones.name

If that doesn't work you could try taking parts of each name and combining them. Like

smjones.com or josmith.com

again you could try user hyphens and the .name extension

If that doesn't work either you could try adding or prefixing:

Middle names, Country, town of birth

If none of that works then adding numbers is the only way left. But don't forget you don't need to just append/pre-pend them you can use them. You can also use them to break up the name as well. Like

Smith-4-jones.com

You could even try

smithandjones.com, smithforjones, smithwithjones etc

You just need to get creative.

Once you have chosen the family name you can then subdivide it for each member of the family.

Personal Websites -How to build Them

2007-12-23T21:13:00.001-08:00

Personal Websites -How to build Them

Personal websites come in all sorts of flavours from simple websites with someone's CV, hobbies, likes and dislikes to special event websites like birthdays, graduation and wedding websites.

Personal websites are different to business websites in two important ways.... Firstly, they aren't usually monetized, and secondly they aren't normally optimized for the search engines.

Personal websites that are used for providing information about a persons likes and interests, events like weddings, births etc have, in the last few years, been replaced by Blogs.

If you are Interested in building a personal website to discuss your favourite football team, a wedding, birth etc then I would recommend that you consider using a blog (Weblogs).

Because they are non-commercial sites. Personal websites can be made very cheaply and even for free . The only major consideration being whether or not you register your own domain name.

Remember domain names aren't just for businesses they can also be used for individuals. Personal domain names are becoming more common and one day we may all have one.

Personal Information

Although you may be placing personal information on the site you should be careful when sharing details like birthdays, mother name, pets names etc.

Your personal Information can be used for identity theft and you would be surprised at how little is required, and what constitutes personal identifiable information.

Getting Started

In order to build a site you need some basic equipment, software and knowledge. Just what is required is covered in starting a website.

Note: If you are completely new to building websites then make sure you take a look at the free make your own website course

Related Articles and resources:

Ready Made Turnkey Website Problems

2007-12-23T21:12:00.007-08:00

Ready Made Turnkey Website Problems

There are several problems that arise with all types of ready made Turnkey websites. They are:

Site is same as thousands of others
Need to do something that it doesn't do
Getting traffic to the website.

Most ready made/turnkey websites offer some degree of customisation and so you can make your site look different by selecting colour schemes, logos etc. This is particularly important if you are using the turnkey website as part of your offline business (doctor, dentist etc).

If you want it to do something it wasn't designed to do then you either have to get someone to change it or do it yourself. Therefore it is particularly important when choosing your turnkey website to consider not only what you want from your website today but in the years to come.

For example you may only want the website to provide basic info like company location and contact details, price list and services at the start. You may then consider using the website to handle customer queries and even to do online bookings and take orders etc.

Therefore before choosing your solution make a list of present and future requirements and choose the one that most satisfied it from day 1. You should also give preference to a turnkey website provider that demonstrate an ongoing commitment to adding new features.

Generally the more specialised the provider the better the chances that they will add new features and develop the product. A general purpose turnkey provider is unlikely to offer this kind of service.

Getting traffic to the website is a problem regardless of what type of turnkey website you have. However with a site that is primarily created to augment the existing offline business then you should:

Include your site address in all stationary.
Include your site address on your business cards.
Include your site address in business email signatures.
Include your site address on advertisements in newspapers etc.
Include your site address on all vehicle/building logos

In effect anywhere you previously had your telephone number should now also contain your website address.

For attracting new business via the Internet then you should see the website promotion section.

All of the above problems affect all types of ready made turnkey websites. A more fundamental problem affects those who are trying to make money with them. So what's wrong with ready made turnkey websites and how to Make Turnkey websites Work .

Related articles and resources:

Ready Made Turnkey Websites

2007-12-23T21:12:00.005-08:00

Ready Made Turnkey Websites

Ready made/Turnkey websites are being offered for sale on the web that require zero knowledge of web technology- a website Nirvana?

With a ready made turnkey website you not only get the website layout, but you can also get the content and even the affiliate programs, Google Adsense, and paypal all plugged in!

All you need to do is collect the cash at the end ! -- True or False ?

Someone once said if it appears to good to be true then.......

Turnkey Websites - Pros and Cons

So what are ready made websites? Are they just get rich quick scheme in disguise? Sadly often -Yes!

Do they have good points?- They certainly do and when used appropriately can be very useful.

I divide them up into three distinct types:-

Get rich quick schemes
Affiliate program extensions
Speciality sites.

They also have two distinct forms:- paid and free.

Get Rich Quick Ready Made Websites.

These are always in the form of paid websites.

So you pay for a turnkey website from Company X - it costs say $300 per year and it promotes products from company X. You don't know what you are doing you fail !- Who wins? ---Company X

OK same scenario but it's a success who wins?-- both of you. It costs company X nothing in either case and they make money in either case. They have really no incentive to help you succeed as they make money anyway.

These type of sites are to be avoided!!!

Affiliate Program Extensions

With affiliate programs you promote some else's product from your website. Some companies in an effort to help their affiliates even more provide the affiliates with a website of their own.

It is often used where the seller has a product that, although it may be in demand, has high competition and looks for ways of making it easy for people to sell the product.

The way it works is simple:

You get a free turnkey website from Company X - it costs nothing and it promotes products from company X. You don't know what you are doing you fail !- Who wins? ---No one

OK same scenario but it's a success who wins?-- both of you. It costs Neither you nor company X in either case and both only make money if you succeed. They now have a real incentive to help you succeed or they make no money!

If you are going to use the website to make money, then this is the group I would recommend you start with.

Speciality Turnkey Websites

This type comes in both free and paid forms and offers a high degree of customisation. Unlike the other two types previously discussed, you provide most of the content.

Speciality website are offered in areas like weddings, dentists, real-estate etc.

The problem with this type of site is that they are often very similar to the get rich quick sites. The way I differentiate them is:

If they emphasise how easy it is to make lots of money then they are offering the get rich quick type. If they emphasise the site features and how it compares to other websites in that niche then it is probably a genuine offer.

Take for example real-estate sites.

Now everyone knows it is possible to make money in real-estate. If you are a broker and want a website as a sales aid you could either do it yourself, get one made, or get a turnkey site.

In this case the ready made/turnkey website would provide you with the main outline and you would supply all the content. You would not have it primarily to make money but for better customer support/contact.

Many professions lend themselves to this type of website like doctors, dentists etc because they all have very similar needs.

However we need to look at the problems that arise with ready made Turnkey websites.

Related articles and resources:

Search Engines

2007-12-23T21:12:00.003-08:00

Search Engines

Search Engines are what make the web usable. They are the first tool people use for finding information on the Internet.

If you have a website then you need, not only to be listed in search engines, but also to have a top 30 search engine ranking.

There are 1000s of different search engines you can use and be listed in, but there are three that you must be listed in... Google, Yahoo and MSN .

Together these three search engines are directly used for 80% of all web searches. Indirectly they are probable responsible for 90-95% of all web searches.

Getting Indexed

All three major search engines have a addurl page where you can submit your website to the search engine for free. There is absolutely no need to ever pay for a search engine listing!

Once you have added you website to the search engine you then need to wait for the search engine to visit you website and index it, and then wait again for the website to show up on Internet searches.

The delay varies with the search engine but 2 weeks to 2 months are typical for a brand new website

However you can get yourself listed in a matter of days if you get your site added to a few directories, popular websites or blog. Search engines will find your site via the link in the directory/blog/site.

Many search engines use links to your website/ web page as a vote for that site/page. The more links pointing to the page (incoming links) the more important the search engines think it is.

Getting A Good Search Engine Ranking

Getting in the index is the first step. However there is no point even being in the search engine index if no one ever finds you when they do a search - your site needs to have a good
search engine ranking.

There are many search engine experts that will help you improve your website search engine ranking, but you can also learn how to do it yourself.

SEO

Search engine optimisation is about getting your web pages optimized for the search engines so they get found. In starting with search engines I take you through the basics.

Related resources and articles:

SubDomains What are they and why Use them?

2007-12-23T21:12:00.001-08:00

SubDomains- What are they and why Use them?

Subdomains allow you to divide your domain name/website into sections or separate areas.

As an analogy if you go to any medium to large company office you will see it divided into various departments like accounts, sales, product development. People who work in these various departments are all located near to each other maybe on the same floor or office section.

You can do the same with your website. If you have a medium/large company you may want to have a separate website for the sales, and another for the Marketing side. Rather then having totally separate websites you can section or divide your main website just as you would a normal office.

There are two main methods used:

Use separate folders
Use Sub domains

Using Separate Folders to Sub Divide a Web Site

This is the most common method and is easy to implement on almost all websites. Here the main domain name is abc.com. to access the website you type in http://www.abc.com or http://abc.com (not always possible). When you do that you get the index.htm file showed circled in yellow (below) for that website.

You can now create folders underneath the main site (here sales and MTG) and each folder will contain files relevant to that department. You can tell you sales customers to access the this folder by giving them the URL of the folder: http://www.abc.com/sales or http://www.abc.com/mtg.

Here when the visitor types
http://www.abc.com/sales
into his browser he gets the home page for that folder - the index.htm file circled in red below.

Note: It is normal and desirable, but not compulsory, to create a home page for each folder such that when someone enters the site using the folder name and not a web page they get the default web page of that folder (folder home page).

Using Sub Domains

In the above examples you can see how easy it was to section the website. The only problem with this form of sectioning is that the URL that you need to give your customers is not what most web users are used to seeing.

To get a more easy to remember URL you need to create subdomains. In our case our domain name is abc.com and a subdomain would look like this: subdomainname.abc.com e.g. sales.abc.com or mtg.abc.com.

Now all we need to do is to associate the sub domain names with their bit of web space. To do this you again create folders but this time you associate each folder with its own domain name as show below:

Now when the visitor types http://sales.abc.com he gets the index.htm file shown circled in red. It is also possible to use the full address http://www.sales.abc.com and get the same file.

Main MenuHeadline

2007-12-23T21:11:00.003-08:00

Main MenuHeadline

Text goes here

Site Design Home
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Checking Domain Availability

2007-12-23T21:11:00.001-08:00

Checking Domain Availability

When choosing a domain name you have to be aware that others may have already registered the domain name. Therefore part of the name selection process is eliminating those names that are already registered.

To check the domain name availability you need to go to any domain registrar and simple enter the domain name of you choice in the domain name search box.

Remember you are only checking the availability at this stage you are not registering the domain name. One of my favourite checkers is www.nameboy.com as it allows you to enter several keywords and it will construct the domain names for you and then check their availability.

First you enter the keywords in my case fruit and juice.

Then hit return and nameboy generates a list of possibilities along with their availability.

For uk domain names I use the tool at www.1and1.co.uk. The only problem is you have go through a few intro screens to get to it.

Registering the Domain Name

Having found an available domain name you can now proceed to register the Domain Name.

Related Articles and Resources:

Top Level Domain Names

2007-12-23T21:10:00.005-08:00

Top Level Domain Names

The top level domains (TLDs) are divided into two groups –non geographic (.com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net, and .org) and Geographic using a country code (.uk, .de, .ca).

The non-geographic TLDS (.com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net, and .org) were the original seven names assigned before the Internet become popular. Domain name extensions in three of these (.com, .net, and .org) could be registered without restriction; the other four have limited purposes and were/are restricted.

The result is that the three domain name extension .com, .net, .org are now the most commonly used on the Internet.

Originally the Internet was a totally USA affair and hence there was no need for any geographic names. This all changed in the 1990s as the Internet spread to The rest of the world and the Geographic TLD extensions were introduced based on existing International country code standards e.g. .uk for United Kingdom and .de for Germany (Deutschland) etc.

Because of increased demand for names, especially non geographic, seven new non geographic TLDS were decided on and introduced in 2001 and 2002. They are (.biz, .info, .name, and .pro, .aero, .coop, and .museum). Here is a list of non-geographic TLDS along with their intended use.

Deciding on the TLD extension to use is the first stage in choosing a domain name

Related Articles and Resources:

Web Design Articles

2007-12-23T21:10:00.003-08:00

Web Design Articles

Adding Images/Pictures to Your Website-Adding Images/Pictures to Your Website and creating thumbnails and rollover effects

15 Questions You Should Ask your Prospective Web Designer- Thinking of hiring a web designer? Then get your questions ready.

Image Maps what are they and how to create one.

Using IFrames-An Iframe is a very useful HTML element for placing content from different sources on a web page.

IFrames Explained - Here we look at the Iframe HTML tag in more detail and explore how to control the frame contents and appearance.

The Home Page - The Home Page is the most important page on your website ! What should it contain?

Starting HTML
- A 5 part course for beginners wanting to learn HTML and who have no previous experience. Starting with the very basics and building..

Starting With cascading style sheets is a 5 part beginners guide for those wanting to learn the fundamentals of css and how to use them:

HTML to XHTML in 10 Steps - If you are familiar with HTML then there are a few syntax rules that you should observe to create XHTML web pages.

Choosing your Site Style or Theme.- It's easy for beginners to spend many days and weeks trying to choose a suitable style for their website and then a few weeks latter change it.

Configure Web Page Editors for XHTML and CSS - Most modern web page/web site editors have support for both XHTML and CSS however you may need to change the default configuration.

Making a Website using free Website Templates- Free Website layout using free Templates. Where can you find free Website templates ? and how to modify and use them for your own website?

How to Make a Website Using Templates Video Tutorial Series-How to use a free or commercial website template to make a website.

Make a web page- Series of tutorials on how to make a web page. Covers fonts, links, tables and images.

Make a Web page Exercise 1 -Web page with headers, bold text and paragraphs.
Make a Web page Exercise 2 Web page including tables
Make a Web page Exercise 3 Web page with bookmarks and links.

Quick Web Page Checks
- Most people upload there web pages open up a browser and see if it displays. This just checks that it has been uploaded. I do a few more quick checks just to check that it is ok.

Validating Web Pages- Are your web pages valid? How do you check and what should you do?

HTML/XHTML Comments- How do you insert HTML/XHTML Comments and why use comments anyway?

Website Fonts - Which ones to use and why and how to declare them

Website Fonts: Specifying the Font Size: How to Specify the Font Size using the old font tag and or CSS and common font problems.

Using TopStyle Lite (CSS Editor)-How to Use TopStyle Lite (CSS Editor) to create style sheets

FrontPage and Embedded Style Sheets-Here we will look at using FrontPage to create Embedded Style sheets

FrontPage External Style Sheets-Here we will look at using FrontPage to create and link External Style sheets

Website Forms- Website Forms are used to gather information from your visitors. How are forms supported and created?

Website Form Basics Part1- Here we look at the HTML for basic Website Forms and how forms are constructed.

Website Form Basics Part2 -Website forms require some form of program to process them. These programs or scripts need not be on your server..

Web Page Backgrounds - How to change Web Page Backgrounds and what to be aware of when using background images.

Web Page and HTML Editors -For beginners starting a website or starting HTML, choosing a suitable editor can be very confusing, as there is a lot to choose from.

Web Page Links-What are hyperlinks? What type of page links are there and how to create web page links.

Advanced Web Page Linking-Have you ever wondered how hyperlinks change colour when you place the mouse over them. In Advanced Web Page Linking we look at special techniques when creating links.

Managing Directory Submissions -How to prepare to add your site to directories and manage the submissions.

How to Password Protect Web Pages/Website- Do you need to protect parts of your website? Here we look the methods used to Password Protect Web Pages.

The basics of a Website -A tutorial covering the basics of-What is a Website, Web page, home page?

Website layout - How are websites structured? Learn the basic website layout.

Web Page Layout Using Tables
- A tutorial showing you the basics of web page layout using tables.

Tables and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) -Cascading style sheets (CSS) can be used to control tables. Controlling tables with CSS makes them far more flexible.

Web Page Layout Using Tables and CSS: Part1 - Tables are easier to use for web page layout than CSS. However using tables for layout doesn't mean that you can't use style sheets as well!

Web Page Layout Using Tables and CSS :Part 2 - Tables are easier to use for web page layout than CSS. However using tables for layout doesn't mean that you can't use style sheets as well! Part 2

Web Page Layout Using Tables-Part 2- Web page layout can have an impact on how the search engines view the page content. Here we look at cell positioning for search engines.

How Search Engines See Your Web Pages -How Search Engines See Your Web Pages is not necessary the way you do! So how do you adjust your page for the search engines?

Your Website Theme -Before you can make your website you need to decide on your Website Theme. Here we will see how to research and choose a website theme.

Web Page Editors- Choosing a suitable web page or XHTML/HTML editor can be difficult especially for a beginner. Here we look at the differences, examine the difference between a page editor and a website editor and which is more suitable

XHTML Explained-What is XHTML? Should you be using it ? How different is it from HTML?

HTML to XHTML in 10 Steps - If you are familiar with HTML then there are a few syntax rules that you should observe to create XHTML web pages.

Configure Web Page Editors for XHTML and CSS - Most modern web page/web site editors have support for both XHTML and CSS however you may need to change the default configuration.

Web Page and XHTML/HTML Editors

2007-12-23T21:10:00.001-08:00

Web Page and XHTML/HTML Editors

For beginners starting a website, or starting XHTML/HTML (see note), choosing a suitable editor can be very confusing, as there are a lot to choose from.

The first point of confusion is in understanding the difference between an XHTML/HTML editor and a Web Page Editor.

An XHTML/HTML editor lets you create a web page by inserting XHTML/HTML tags. Whereas a web page editor lets you create a web page by simply typing in the text and and selecting the formatting from a toolbar.

With a web page editor you don't normally see the XHTML/HTML tags unless you want to, whereas with the XHTML/HTML editor, you not only see them, you have to insert them yourself.

Note: HTML is gradually moving to XHTML. A far as editors are concerned they will all be upgraded to support the XHTML standard or become obsolete (See XHTML explained for more details.). In choosing an editor you should always give preference to those that support the new standard.

All of the major vendors have support for XHTML and CSS in their latest products however the level of support does vary and usually involves making preference changes.

Also note that is this seems a little too techie for you don't worry just ignore the distinction as it doesn't really matter that much in practise anyway. You can always return to it at a later date.

Using an XHTML/HTML editor

In order to use an XHTML/HTML editor you need to understand XHTML/HTML (see starting HTML). I do not recommend this option for beginners except for those who want to practice coding XHTML/HTML and checking for correct XHTML/HTML formatting.

There are many XHTML/HTML editors (mostly free) available for download on the Internet the ones I use and would recommend are:

Trellian Code Page - Excellent simply and easy to use yet powerful ideal for beginners. Doesn't support the new XHTML standard and cascading style sheets.
CSE XHTML/HTML validator Lite - Incredibly powerful XHTML/HTML Editor and XHTML/HTML validator. -Recommended download.
Note Tab Lite --Very powerful Notepad replacement I use for creating articles it also has XHTML/HTML editing and checking .

Even though it doesn't support XHTML I would recommend that Beginners start with Trellian Code Page.

Web Page Editors

The only web Page editors I recommend are WYSIWYG ( what you see is what you get) editors. These editors make creating a web page as easy as writing a letter. In order to use these editors you don't need any knowledge of XHTML/HTML.

There are two types of editors ( my distinction) Web Page Editors like Trellian webpage and Web site editors like Microsoft FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

Using A web Page Editor

These editors are inexpensive (most free), easy to use, and incorporate most of the features of programs like FrontPage, but they only let you edit a single page at a time.

Features like find and replace text over several web pages are not supported. If you rename a page you will manually have to change the links in other pages etc.

These editors are highly suitable for beginners and for simple edits of singular web pages. As your website grows ( more than 20 pages) you will probably outgrow this type of editor.

That said, this page is being prepared using one ( Trellian Webpage). Once finished I will copy and paste into FrontPage and complete the linking.

The editor I previously recommended was Trellian WebPage which like Trellian Code page is available for free. However this editor doesn't currently support XHTML and CSS and so I only use this editor for quick edits of old pages and pages that I don't publish online.

The free editor I currently recommend is NVu ( pronounced N-view). It is a complete open source Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. -Recommended download.

Web Site Editors

These programs are designed not just for making web pages but also for site management. They allow you to create site themes and to find and replace text across multiple web pages etc.

They are much more powerful than the simple web page editors but are generally also more difficult to use for beginners.

I would recommend you use a very basic WYSIWYG (What you see is what you Get) web page editor like NVu at the start and then progress to using a web site editor later as your web site expands. The editors that I have used and would recommend are:

Microsoft FrontPage --Very powerful editor and simple to use especially for anyone already familiar with other Microsoft products like Word. I currently use this one. It is easy to get going with and powerful enough for most applications. (see Starting with FrontPage)
DreamWeaver-- Undoubtedly the editor of choice for most Web designers. More powerful than FrontPage and produces much cleaner XHTML/HTML than FrontPage. -Much More expensive though and more difficult to get started with.
I would only recommend this for experienced web designers or those who are going to be producing commercial web sites.
Are you a would be Internet marketer? Then you may be interested in taking a look at what is being billed as The Internet Marketer's alternative to FrontPage and DreamWeaver. The software is called Xsitepro.

Get Your Web Editor for Free!

Many Web hosting providers offer web editing software for free so if you haven't chosen your web hosting provider then it pays to shop around a bit.

For UK visitors 1&1 uk are offering Microsoft FrontPage 2003 free with any Microsoft hosting package and NetObjects Fusion for any Linux hosting plan.

For USA visitors 1&1 Web Hosting USA are offering NetObjects Fusion for any Linux hosting or Microsoft hosting package plan.

Online Web Page Creation

Many hosts offer on line graphical creation pages where you can create your web page using a browser. For the most part they are simple to use but they usually require a particular browser version.

They come with professional templates and although it tends to be easier to create web pages ,changes, especially to multiple pages can be difficult. Generally they have page limitations, so are only suitable for small personal or hobby websites.

The major exception to this however is the site Build-it package which is a complete web site building, management and promotion package. I personally use this package for one of my websites and would recommend you consider this, if your plan is to build an online business not just a web site. For more information see the site build-it section.

Notes:

I've used Dreamweaver, FrontPage, Trellian WebPage and NVU. With all editors I have had need at one time or another to edit the actual code. This isn't difficult and just requires understanding the basics. So if you haven't quite got round to it, I would urge you to take a look at starting HTML.

Related Articles and resources:

How to Make a web page using web page editors
How to make your own web page in HTML
Starting with FrontPage

Web Page Optimization Part 1

2007-12-23T21:07:00.001-08:00

Web Page Optimization - Part 1

Correct Web page optimization requires that all of the various web page elements are optimized. Optimization is required for each web page that you write so as to achieve best results at the search engines.

As stated in the previous article (starting with search engines) - searchers search using keywords/ phrases and in order to be found by the search engine your web page must be optimized for those same keywords/ phrases

When optimizing web pages there are five areas to consider.

Before proceeding it is important to point out that some search engines seem to penalize for over optimization. Therefore always err on the side of caution. You can check your pages position after a few months and adjust accordingly.

Important note: I have inserted extra characters in the keywords used as examples in this article to prevent the search engines ranking this page for the example keywords.

The keywords for the Web Page

First make a list of keywords for the web page. This list will be derived from your keyword research (see resources below for keyword research articles).

I will use the list from the proceeding article (Website Content and Search Engines) repeated below.

We are going to optimize our web page for the keyword phrase "bungxxee jumpping texxas". (*see note above).

Optimizing Meta tags

Firstly, if you are not sure what meta tags are then see Meta tags explained. As far as web page optimization is concerned we are only interested in

Title Tag

This is by far the most important tag of the page and should contain your keyword/keyword phrase and as far as possible only your keyword/ keyword phrase.

Example Titles:

Notice the use of the so called stop word "in" that makes the title make sense to human readers. Search engines ignore this word except if you do a search with the keyword in quotes. i.e.

"bungxxee jumpping texxas" and not bungxxee jumpping texxas which is normal.

The important point is that the Title makes sense to human readers as they will also be reading the page. Where possible start the title with the keyword phrase (1 and 2) above.

HTML
<TITLE> Bungxxee Jumpping Texxas</TITLE>

Continued in- Web Page Optimisation - Part 2- optimizing the meta description and keyword tags.

Related articles and resources:

Web Page Optimization- Introduction
Part 2- optimizing the meta description and keyword tags.
Part 3- Optimizing Headlines and body content (the main page text)
Part 4- Optimizing Alt images and links

Web Page Optimization

2007-12-23T21:06:00.007-08:00

Web Page Optimization

Web page optimization is about making web pages so that they are more likely to be found and highly ranked by the search engines. It is the main part of the the overall website optimization (optimisation) process.

The reason why is simple.... Most web pages are found by people searching using a search engine like Google or Yahoo, and for most websites, search engines are the major source of traffic.

Do Web Pages need Optimization

Web Page Optimization is a must if you want or need to improve your website search engine ranking. However what if you are using other promotional methods and aren't really worried about a good search engine ranking?

Well in this case many would say forget the optimization. However; the reality is that all web pages need some basic optimization. By not optimizing your pages you are not only wasting potentially valuable traffic, but , what would you say if one of your clients phoned and said -

"Hi Jim I was looking for your website on the Internet to check on one of your products but couldn't find it! - You do have a website ? don't you?"

Surely you want to be found when someone types your company name into a search engine!

Local Search and Web Site/Page Optimization

Most people see the Internet as global and hence not really relevant to a small local business. That used to be the case but that situation is changing rapidly with local search.

The major search engines (2005) are all introducing a local search capability. It is only a matter of time before local search replaces the yellow pages for locating local businesses and services.

You may be plumber in "Never never land" and be of no interest to someone looking for a plumber in Texas but surely you want to be found when someone types:-plumber "never never land" into a search engine.

So surely a web page that starts:

Jones the plumber serving the needs of the local community covering never never land and surrounding areas including under milk wood etc.

is better than one that says:

Jones the plumber serving the needs of the local community since 1955.

Whether you are making you own website or employing a web designer/company you need to be aware of basic website/ web page optimization techniques and make sure that at the very least you do the basics.

Related articles and resources:

Part 1 Optimizing title and heading tags
Part 2- optimizing the meta description and keyword tags.
Part 3- Optimizing Headlines and body content (the main page text)
Part 4- Optimizing Alt images and links

Web Pages

2007-12-23T21:06:00.005-08:00

Web Pages

Web pages are the fundamental building blocks of a website. A website is simply a collection of linked web pages stored on a web server (see website layout).

There are two aspects to a web page - technical (html, meta tags) and non technical (copywriting and optimisation). You need to be aware of both aspects in order to create good web pages.

It is also important to learn this process in distinct steps. Please don't try to make a well written ,search engine optimised web page complete with logo and site navigation from day 1.

The basic steps are:

Making basic web pages

Look at the html behind the pages
Examine hidden page elements that are used for search engines
Adding the navigation and logo
Search engine optimisation
Writing good web copy

OK. First things first . Let's start by learning how to make web pages using web page editors.

Once you are able to make basic web pages then it's time to examine them in a little more detail. Firstly you need to understand HTML (Hypertext Markup Language).

It is not important to become an expert but to have a basic understanding of it's structure. Starting HTML is a 5 part tutorial series for just that purpose.

Now that you can make basic pages and are familiar with the HTML code behind a basic page you need to examine the web page structure in even more detail.

A web page consists of two components.

A visible component (what the visitor actually sees)
An invisible one (formatting, scripting components, meta tags etc)

Shown here in the schematic

When examining the web page HTML this is what we see:

<html>
<head>
..............Meta tags go here
</head>
<body>
........Visible Page Content goes
here
</body>
</html>

The Hidden Web Page Components.

These components are not visible to the web page visitors and are used to provide information for use by web browsers and search engines (meta tags).

They are also normally invisible in most web page editors (in normal mode). However most web page editors have a view source tab which reveals the actual HTML coding and the hidden meta tags, scripts and comments.

Because you need to view the HTML source code itself to see these tags, and in most editors to modify them, they are frequently overlooked. In addition, most editors will enter default information for some of the meta tags.

Editing Meta Tags

As previously mentioned the meta tags are not only hidden from the visitor they are also hidden from the designer as they are not normally displayed by most WYSIWYG web page editors.

It is however very important that you are able to Edit meta tags and understand which meta tags are common to all pages and which one are unique to each page.

There are two main uses for the meta tags they are:

Search engines-these include the title, description, keywords and robot tags and are perhaps the most important meta tags These tags should always be used and are discussed in meta tags explained .
Web page information and control- These are the Doctype tag, script include tags, author tags etc and are covered in Common meta tags.

The Visible Web Page

The visible parts of the web page consist of the actual web page content, logo and the website/page navigation. A typical web page is show below:

You can learn how to make basic web pages by following the make web pages tutorial series.

These tutorials cover the basic mechanics of making a web page. In addition you need to be able to layout your web page with site navigation and

Web pages are read not only by people but also by search engine spiders. In order to write successful web pages you need to be able to write for both.

Writing for search engines is covered in web page optimization series and writing web copy is covered in the free download make your words sell.

Now that you understand about web pages it's time to make the first and most important web page in the site- The home Page.

Web Site Hosting Guide

2007-12-23T21:06:00.003-08:00

Web Site Hosting Guide

Choosing a website host, website hosting provider or hosting package from the many thousands of companies offering website hosting packages can be extremely confusing.

The object is not to choose the cheapest, or the one with the most features, but the one you need. Most providers bundle basic web hosting with a variety of web services like email, newsletters, databases etc and combine them into packages or hosting plans.

The choice really becomes one of choosing the most appropriate package for your present and future needs. You should always prefer a provider that allows you to upgrade the package seamlessly (i.e. with no disruption)

In general, hosting providers provide several service package levels e.g.

Basic
Business
Professional
Ecommerce (i.e. a shop).

When you examine these offerings you find that the professional may support a SQL database, SSL etc and the basic one doesn't. When you are new to website building its difficult to decide what you need, as you're probably not sure as to what most of the terms mean anyway.

Generally I would say that if you don't understand it then you probably don't need it; as it is very unlikely that you will ever use it. Because of the huge array of offers it is impossible to compare them all and to make any firm recommendations.

Hosting Guidelines

Therefore what I will do is to list the basics that you require and some do's and don'ts.

In general I would always advise you to go for the basic option and upgrade if you need to later, unless you are sure you need a service offered in a more expensive package.
Always choose a provider that lets you upgrade your package.
Always choose a provider that lets you cancel your package and get a refund if your not happy. That is, look for a good guarantee.
Always use the same company to host your website and register your domain name! Therefore when comparing prices you need to take both into consideration.
Don't go for the provider just because they offer everything- you probably ( almost definitely) don't need it all anyway.
Don't worry about if its Linux or Microsoft windows.- It doesn't normally make a difference to you, even if you are using Microsoft FrontPage.
You don't necessarily need Microsoft FrontPage sever extension support even if you are using Microsoft FrontPage.
If you do need Microsoft FrontPage sever extension support then it can be provided on both Linux and Microsoft.
Always look for good software deals. Hosting providers can't really differentiate themselves anymore with web services so they bundle software. It is possible to get your web editing software (like FrontPage) completely free by choosing the right hosting provider.
You don't have to be in the same country as the hosting provider but if they are supplying free software it will probably be on CD, and it may mean that you aren't eligible- do check.
Host you site in the same country as your target market. That is if you are UK based but you want to target the American market then host the site on a server in USA or Canada.
Websites with special requirements include music\video\dvd download sites like adult websites. Because they require high bandwidth, storage and may be restricted by some providers you should see below for more details.

Website Hosting Providers

There are many hosting providers on the Internet but you may save yourself some time by taking a look at the ones below:

Blue Host Web Hosting $6.95 Per Month - USA based Professional website hosting . Incredible feature rich package including Wordpress.
Anhosting- USA based Professional website hosting for $6.95 per month. Incredible feature rich package including Wordpress.
One and one -UK
Site Build-it- This is a totally different solution as it is a complete website building, hosting, promotion package. To learn more about site build-it start with the site build-it review on this website.

Multiple Websites

If you think that you will eventually have more than one site then you should look at hosting them on a single account. This is discussed in Multiple Domain/website Hosting

Domain Names

Although not strictly speaking necessary I would recommend you use the hosting provider for the web hosting and for the domain name.

In domain names you can learn about the different domain types and how to choose a domain.

If you already have a domain name and want to use another provider you will have to arrange for the domain name to be transferred ( most hosting providers will do this) or you can use the technique of web forwarding to redirect the domain (not recommended).

Speciality Website Hosting Packages

If you require a website for some special function then you may find it better to go to a hosting provider that specialises in that area. Ready Made or Turnkey websites are often used, very common examples are wedding websites and real estate websites.

Other Hosting Solutions

Most of you will use a shared hosting provider as described above. There are however alternatives like using your ISP web space or you own web server. If you want to look at these alternatives in more detail they are discussed in
Website Hosting and Host Options.

Related Articles and Resources