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If you have your own website you can use it to do
business and make money in many ways, like having an online store,
sell digital downloadable stuff, let other people advertise on your
site, do affiliate marketing (promoting other's services or
products), and more.
The tools and services you need to build a website are:
In
order to conctruct a website you need a web site builder.
There are lots of software that can do the job, also free
software. Two of the good ones of the kind are Ewen Chia's
My
Free Web Site Builder,
and
KompoZer.
Many web hosting services offer a site
builder as an integrated part of their service, included in the
hosting fee. That is the case for the recommended hosting companies
below.
When you are earning some money from
your online business, you may consider to buy a more advanced site
builder. One of the very best software on the market for internet
marketers today is
XSitePro.
I recommend that you purchase it if/when you can afford to.
It costs (at the time of writing) $197 USD. You can buy it
here.
Another good and affordable site builder is
CoffeeCup
($49 at writing time).
Further, you need a domain name, which should
reflect your business name. It must be a unique name, different from
all other domain names on the internet. You can
check here
if the name you would like to have is available. Domain names cost
from about $2 USD to about $20 per year depending on the provider
and which suffix you choose (.com, .net, .info .us, .eu etc.).
One of the best places to buy
domain names is
Namecheap.com.
N.B.! When you sign up with a web hotel (see below) they will
provide you with a domain name (of your choice) which is usually
included in the hosting fee.
You must have a web hotel (web hosting service) for your
site to "stay", which means that you rent a "room" on a web server
for your site. When you have your website ready for publishing it
must be uploaded to a web server to be available to visitors on the
internet. There are hundreds of web hotel providers "out there",
of which I'm using a few. I
recommend
Hostgator, a quality web hosting service, and
BlueHost, which
is slightly cheaper but still very good.
There are also free web hosting services which
I do not recommend if you are serious about your
internet business. Most of the free hosting services put ads on your
pages in return for their service, and they are also not as reliable
as paid hosting. But if you insist on using free hosting, here is
the best service I have found, with many nice features and no ads
on your pages:
000Webhost.com.
Please read our article
Building A Website
before you actually start constructing your site!
Now you must decide whether you would like to have a
site builder on your computer or you'd rather use the online site
builder of the hosting service. Both solutions work well. You have
more control and flexibility with a computer based builder while it
might be easier to get started with a server based one.
Obviously, if you decide to go for an online builder,
you'll first have to sign up with a hosting company. If you choose
the recommended Hostgator's or Ipower's services you are on safe ground. If you
would prefer to have your own site builder on your computer you can
download one of the free ones (see above) or purchase a builder that
you install on your computer. Once this step is completed you are
ready to build your very own web site!
You may need a photo editor (software) to edit
images that you want to put onto your pages. A well known and good
editor is Adobe Photoshop, but if you don't want to spend money
there are several free editors available. Perhaps the best of them
is
Gimp,
and you will find a couple others on
this website.
You'd probably like to put graphics like a
header, footer and other things on your pages. You might not want to
create the graphics yourself, so
here's a site
where you can download free headers and here's
another site
with graphics of different kinds.
You can find free website templates
here,
and you'll find lots of free photos to put on your site
here
and
here.
Photos are often of large file
size and if you have many of them on your pages, they can slow down
your site. Fortunately there is a little piece of software that
reduces the file size of pictures and make them "internet friendly".
It's called PixResizer
and is free to download and use.
When your site is ready to "go on net", it has to be
published, which means it must be uploaded from your
computer to your web hotel (web server). Your web hosting provider
will give you the necessary uploading details when you order their
service. You will need an FTP client (software) to help you
upload your site to the web server. FileZilla is a good
free FTP program which you can download
here. On that site you also can learn how to use the software.
Also,
most site builders have built in publishing
(uploading) features.
Note:
If you use an online web site builder (on your web hosting's server)
you don't have to publish (upload) as the site is located on
the server from the very start. The recommended hosting services have online
(server based) website builders and also built in FTP program.
Good luck!
Kanute Fleming
P.S. If you get stuck with
your website, you're welcome to email me at
support@onlinehomebizniz.com and I'll be happy to help you out.
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