There are many people I have spoken with that would love to start their own website but they just do not know where to begin, or they are too intimidated. If you are one of these people, hopefully this article will ease your mind. My goal in writing this article is to make the website building process as easy as possible. I will also share some of my mistakes with you so you can avoid those and hopefully minimize your own.
Once you have come up with the idea in which you want to build your site around you need to develop your site with the goal of having people be able to find it. Seems obvious but a lot of people, and I was guilty of this with my first site as well, think they build a site and upload it and BAM flocks of people will find it. Well, it doesn’t work that way at all. Even if you get your site on the net and submit it to the major search engines it still does not mean it will even show up in a search. My first site, which is no longer even on the net, got no visitors and I couldn’t figure out why. It was about politics, so I knew the subject matter was relatively popular. You can put together the best site possible but if nobody finds it what good will it do you?
Keeping this in mind, let’s discuss the building of the site. If you are looking for a inexpensive, not very involved, site there are many free site builders out there. For my first site I used, www.cutesitebuilder.com. You go to the web development option on this site and you will see Cute Site Builder. This was a very easy tool to use, however it is very limited in what it can do. There are certainly many other free options, I just do not have personal experience with any others to make recommendation. If you want a more involved site you can pay for a site building program. For my current site, www.bestinternetbargains.com, I purchased Dreamweaver 8. They offer a 30 day trial period first, which I recommend. It costs $399 for the program so you should be sure you like it before dishing out the money. Here is the link to the page on my site, to make it a little easier for you. http://www.bestinternetbargains.com/electronics-computer%20software.dwt. It is found under Macromedia.
Once you find a building tool you are comfortable with you start building. There are many programs out there to make your site as interesting and attractive to look at, just like above some can be free and some can cost you. For my logo on my site I used a site called www.flamingtext.com. They have many different options for you to build any logo you want. They also have buttons and things like that as well. I had some good luck with this site and I would recommend it highly. But, just like anything else on the net, there are hundreds of other options out there. Find the one that suits your needs and comfort level the best.
Back to writing the site to make people be able to find it. I bet you thought I got off track. You need to select key words that best describe your site. What are keywords, right? If someone were looking for your site and were to do a search in Google for example, what words might someone type in to find your site. How do you know what words are the right ones to use? There are a few sites out there for that but you can try www.overture.com. This is not for all search engines though. From all the information I have read you multiply the results times 8 and that will give you the estimated searches for a particular word for the previous month.
Most people would think that you need to pick the most popular word as it means there is a greater chance to be found. This is not the case. The more popular words have much greater competition so a new site would be fighting an uphill battle. There is a tool I HIGHLY recommend to you that will explain this much better than I could. It is called SEO Elite . It is $167 but WELL worth the investment. It will explain things like meta tags, head tags, alt images, and then some. All these things were Greek to me before I bought the program. After using the program and using the techniques I now understand all those things and how they can catapult you to the top of the page rankings. Most sites do not use these tools properly, if at all.
There are other sites that are free and promise to get you truckloads of traffic to your site. I joined a couple and they did increase my traffic. One example is www.trafficswarm.com. The problem with sites like this is, you earn visitors by visiting other sites and earning credit points. The more credit points you earn the more people see your site. It is very time consuming to earn points. In addition to that, people are just clicking on links to earn points, they don’t even read your site most of the time. So, just be smart about where you spend your time and money, they are both valuable and limited.
I think I have hit on some of the key points that should help you get started. Some of what you need will be trial and error. Don’t be afraid to make ongoing changes to your site once it is up, there is always a way to improve it.
Sincerely,
Scott Bianchi
www.bestinternetbargains.com
(more sites to come soon)
Copyright 2005 Scott Bianchi
About The Author
Scott Bianchi is a full-time insurance professional who has recently gotten into building his own websites as a hobby.
"Starting Your Own Website"- copywritten in 2005
