Sarting Online Business Step-By-Step (Part-3)

You have already learnt about communicating your clients and payment procedure, now we are going to get some products for sale. We will start with website design!!

To design a simple website you need to know HTML and CSS. HTML is very simple and if you already don’t know it then it will take around 3-7 days to learn the basics. But to become professional it may take a few more days. CSS is also very easy to learn and won’t be hard for you. Here are a few resources on basic HTML and CSS learning…

www.w3schools.com/html/DEFAULT.asp

www.utexas.edu/learn/html/

webdesign.about.com/od/beginningtutorials/p/bl_begin.htm

www.w3schools.com/css/

www.w3.org/Style/CSS/learning

www.utexas.edu/learn/css/

Now after learning HTML and CSS let us build our first website. What you need here is a good topic/content for you website, a domain name and a web hosting to host your website.

Website Topic/Content

This question can make you confused enough but don’t worry much about it. Just choose your favourite hobby or anything such as dogs, cats, buildings, forest, famous persons or whatever you like as your website topic. Gather enough information on your chosen topic and images. Do some research on your topic and search on Google for existing websites on that topic.

Domain Name and Hosting

Now you are ready with a topic and website content, you need to choose a title and domain name or url for your website. You can buy a domain name from any domain registrar such as Godaddy.com, NameCheap.com or MyDomain.com but you need a Credit Card or Paypal account to pay for the domain name. The same thing applies for hosting.

As I assume that this is your first website and you do not have a Credit Card or Paypal account, what you can do is get a free hosting from any of the following free hosting providers. Also most of them will give you a free sub-domain which will be enough for now.

www.free-webhosts.com

http://www.mister.net/

http://www.zymic.com/free-web-hosting/

In the next few articles we will discuss more on free and paid web hosting, domain names and website contents. So don’t worry much about it now. Just let us complete your first website for now.

There are a few negative sites of having free hosting such as most of them will put some kind of ads on your page which may affect your layout. Also many of them will not allow you to use your own domain rather you have to use their sub-domain to reach your website. Still they are good for educational or learning purpose.

Now you have your website content, web pages, a domain/sub-domain and hosting for you website. What you need to do is upload your files to that hosting and test your website. We will learn about monetizing the web page in our next article, but I want to discuss about a few software here that will make your job easier.

For writing HTML you can use normal Notepad that comes with windows (never use Microsoft word or such word processors) but it will be easier for you if you use some kind of HTML authoring software such as DreamWeaver, CoffeeCup HTML Editor or HotDog Professional etc. There are many other editors availbale and some of them are free, try out a few of them and use the one you feel easier for you.

I am using HotDog Professional for a long time and its very simple, easy and user-friendly. You can get a review and download link (Trial) here

For working with graphics your best choice would be Adobe Photoshop and Ulead GIF Animator. Gif images are used in webpages for small animations and Ulead GIF Animator is really great for the job. And I hope I don’t have to speak much of Adobe Photoshop as most of you already know its power.

To upload the files in your hosting server you can use web baser FTP client (most of the web hosts have them in their control panel) but you should use a FTP Client Software such as CuteFTP, FileZilla or SmartFTP.There are many other Free FTP Clients available but FileZilla is one of the best and its 100% FREE. You can download it from here.

So now your website is ready and what you need is some visitors there. First of all you have to submit your website to Search Engines such as Google Search Engine, Yahoo and MSN Search Engine. Search engines drive the most traffic to your site and this depends on your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) knowledge. We will discuss more on SEO in our next articles but for now just remember the word.

For submitting your website to search engines either you can visit each of them and add your url but this is very time consuming and your won’t be able to submit at too many of them. There are a few software available that helps you to do the job and also some websites where you can put your url and hit enter and your site will be submitted to hundreds of search engines. IPB or Internet Business Promoter is a very powerful SEO software which helps you to manage all these stuffs like Search engine submission, Site Optimization and Link Exchange Management. There are many other free software available and you can also check these sites to submit your website…

http://freewebsubmission.com/

http://www.submitexpress.com/submit.html

www.addme.com/

Search at Google.com using “free site submitter” or “free website submission software” and such other key words to find more information on this.

After submitting to search engines what you can do is post on some forums (at the website review section) about your website and ask people to visit and review your site. This will bring you a few visitors to your website and also good suggestion on what mistakes you have done and what is good about your website. These reviews are really helpful sometimes and you will notice many major ideas on their reviews.

Social Bookmarking is another good way to make your site popular and you will get good reviews and traffic from them also. Join Squido, StumbleUpon,  Qassia and other bookmarking websites/community and submit your site there.

Qassia.com

StumbleUpon.com

Squido.com

Now you have submitted your website to Search Engines, posted on forums for reviews and bookmarked on social bookmarking sites. These will bring a few traffic/visitor at your site and the more your site is indexed by the search engines, the more people will be visiting your sites. But if you want to get more visitor and index it much better, you have to exchange links with other sites with similar topic or different topics. A good idea is to post comments on Blogs. Many blogs accepts comments from readers without registration and if you can comment on a lot of blogs, you will receive good backlinks from them. Now the best part comes and that is web directory submissions. There are thousands of web directories available to accept your link – both free and paid. You don’t need to submit to paid directories rather there are many free web directories availble. One problem is most of the free web directories maintain a “NO-FOLLOW” link that is no good for your site. So try to use free submission with reciprocal links which doesn’t have a “NO-FOLLOW” attribute. Before or after adding links to those directories you have to put their link on your site and they will check it and confirm your submission when successful. Submit to as many web directories as you can. These links will remain there for a long time and will bring you good link back and good future for your website. Also you may post on webmaster forums for link exchange with other posters. Many people would love to exchange links with you so this is also a good idea.

Now In this part you learnt the basics of website design, hosting and promoting your site. These are all basic ideas and knowledge and I will be keep posting details on SEO, Web Directory, Google Page Rank, CSS, HTML, Domain Name, Hosting etc. so keep visiting regularly and please try to search on Google for articles on these topics. Read as many as you can and you will gather good knowledge as time passes…