How to Build A Cheap Professional Web Site

Time to Build your Web Site

Well, now you've completed all of the preliminary steps to building a cheap professional looking web site, and you've purchased your domain name and hosting. Now it's time to actually build your web site. First, you need to decide what type of software you want to use. Your basic choices are outlined below.

Use a basic html editor, and learning to code html by hand. This gives you the "cleanest" code, and really unique pages, but html language isn't quick or easy to learn. If you're a beginner at this, I wouldn't suggest this route to build a whole web site. You may still need to know a little about html, in order to write certain features into some of your pages. There is an excellent guide you can access for free here - Free html Guide . Although it hasn't been updated in some time, it contains all of the basic info and scripts you should need for most functions, as well as links to other information sources. A handy downloadable pdf version is also available.

Use the online site builder provided by your web host. This is usually a free tool, although some hosts do charge a small fee to access it. For e-commerce, I would only suggest using it to build a small one sales page/one order page web site to sell a single digital product. These tools do establish and check all of your link structure for you, and build your pages automatically. This might also be a reasonable choice If your website is only going to be a standard 5 or 6 page "brochure" site, that tells about your company and products or service, and gives your contact information, without actually selling a product. My main problem with all of these types of tools is that the site structure they create is complicated and not very intuitive, and large sites can accumulate errors that end up garbling the entire site when you try to add other features.

Use an online blogging platform. This a really easy way to start a web site, and it's free. In fact, you don't even need a domain name or hosting to do it. However, you are somewhat limited in what you can do, as far as optimizing your site. For an e-commerce site that will be selling a large group of products, this isn't really a good option. For a site that is only going to be selling affiliate products that each have their own sales page that you can link to, it is one option. Also, now that http://www.blogger.com is owned by Google, it is something you can use to help promote your new web site. If you plan to have a blog on your web site, you can re-publish your posts to Blogger a week or so after you post them on your site. If not, you can host your web site's blog there, and simply post short informational topics, with a link back to your web site. I would suggest that everyone get a gmail account, sign up for Blogger and use it frequently. This will help your web site get indexed more quickly by Google. While you're at it, sign up for a Yahoo! email account and set up a home page there. Once you have a blog, you can add its feed link to your Yahoo! home page, and get your site more quickly indexed by Yahoo!.

Use a blogging platform hosted on your web site. There are many choices available when it comes to building a blog, and most of them are free. A good web host will offer you several, along with "one click" installation of the blog script. You will need to set up a database to handle the blogs data, but many hosts have a tutorial or written instructions to help you do this. Some of the most popular blog platforms are WordPress, Movable Type, b2evolution and Textpattern (really a CMS). While all of them have their own positive and negative points, I've found WordPress to be the best documented and easiest to use. The blog version of this website was crested using Wordpress. One important point to remember is that I have yet to find a host who maintains the latest version of all the blogging platforms that they offer. This is because upgrades and security fixes happen quite frequently with most of them. My suggestion would be to skip the easy install offered by your hosting company, and download the latest version from the blog software home site. The latest version of WordPress can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/ . Use the deatiled instructions found there to install it on your website. It isn't any harder than upgrading an older version, and you'll gain the knowledge you need to upgrade to future versions. HINT: Contact your host to find out the "path to your database". It is something you need to install your blog, and it can be different for every hosting company. The resources at http://www.wordpress.org are pretty extensive, and you can access an excellent, free guide to WordPress by Podz at this link - Free WordPress Guide . There are links to the other common blogging platforms on the "Additional Resources " page.

Use a CMS (content management system). In essence, blog platforms are also content management systems (Textpattern even calls itself "a CMS that can also build blogs"), but a CMS builds sites that look and perform more like "real" web sites. This is another good way to build a large, multi-page web site. There are many different scripts you can use, if you take this route. Some of the most popular are Joomla, Mambo and Drupal. There is a learning curve for all of these, similar to building your pages off-line using a WYSIWYG editor. Many premium web hosts offer quick, free installs for these applicatrions. The documentation and help for these applications can be lacking, but there are inexpensive guides that you can buy to help you learn how to use them. My personal favorite is Joomla, simply because there are so many easily available templates and extensions for it, and many of them are free. But Drupal and Mambo both run a close second. You can find out more about Joomla, and even try an online demo of it at http://www.joomla.org. There is an good video tutorial to Joomla with 400 templates and 75 of the most popular extensions, plus a guide on how to build a Joomla template, that you can purchase at this link - Joomla Magic. Bonus:I've been able to arrange a special price on an excellent video tutorial, plus an assortment of pre-made Joomla sites, 500 extensions and 500 templates, Joomla template builder software, and some extra marketing bonuses, and you can get it for only $1 more than Joomla Magic by clicking on this link - Ready Made Joomla. You can get more info on Drupal, and try out an online demo by going to http://drupal.org. There is an excellent series of video tutorials to Drupal and a resource guide that you can buy by clicking this link - The Ultimate Guide to Drupal. If you'd like to find out more about Mambo you can visit http://mambo-foundation.org/. Unfortunately, I don't have any info on a good guide to Mambo at this time, but the resources at the Mambo web site should be some help.

Use a specilized program for site building. There are specilized programs that build web sites in their own particular way. Some of the more well known of these are Flash, NetObjects, MicroSoft Front Page and DreamWeaver. We're not even going to go there. If you're a web site developer and you want to spend weeks or months getting to know one of these programs and learning to use it to build sites for your clients, great. But, if you're a newbie trying to build your first web site, they really aren't your best option. They are all expensive (Flash Pro is $699!), have a steep learning curve, and some don't even produce the kind of SEO optimized web site that you should be trying to build. As I said, let's not even go there.

Use an off-line WYSIWYG editor. Personally, this is my favorite way to build a traditional web site. Even though I'm pretty proficient in writing html by now, actually seeing what the finished product will look like as I make it is something I've grown used to. I've tried a large number of free WYSIWYG editors over the years, Trellian, Nvu, Amaya, Sea Monkey (Mozilla) Composer, and several others. None of them worked very well. Some create their own file types (extensions), which makes them incompatible with common templates, and makes editing them by hand tricky or impossible. Others are difficult to learn to use, or simply don't have the features that allow you to create dynamic, stable pages. Still others create such garbled html that hand editing it is possible but difficult. If money is really tight and you have to go with a free one, I'd suggest KompoZer, the unofficial version NvU with known bugs fixed. You can get it here, http://www.kompozer.net/ . It doesn't compare to either of my suggestions for below, but it is the least buggy of the free ones. HINT: When you're starting a new website on Komposer, you must upload your first page (just put some simple text on it) BEFORE moving on to build the complete page, or other pages. You also must upload your pages using its built in ftp software. This is my biggest complaint with Komposer. Each site you build is strictly a separate entity, and moving files and info between sites is possible, but not easy or intuitive. I'd like to recommend the inexpensive WYSIWYG software I've been using for years, but it is no longer distributed. Although I still use it, support for it has ended, so I recently tried out the demos and trials for a bunch of other WYSIWYG editors. The one which I found really easy and intuitive to use is the 123 WYSIWYG HTML Editor. It is my favorite low cost solution. It can handle both html and css templates, and the functions and menus most closely resemble the old software I was used to. It comes with a complete users manual and email support. It also comes with over 100 fast load templates that you can use and modify to build your web site, and a half dozen other bonuses to help you build and optimize your web site, something my old software didn't include. You can use the link above to find out more, see a video showing how to quickly build a page using it, and get a $50 discount off the regular price. Hint: Hit the "Back" button once you reach the page to save an additional $20!

Use a pre-built site software package. That's right, if you have no idea what products you might want to sell, or if you already intend on focusing you efforts on Adsense and affiliate sales commissions, or if you decide you want to get a web site up quickly and refine it into a more customized site later, then you can buy software that will build your web site for you. Now, before you get too excited, there is going to be some set up invloved in building your web site, and the content won't be as good as if you wrote it yourself. But, it is much easier than taking all of the content you have and building it into a unique website. Plus, using a WYSIWYG editor and the content and products you should already have collected, you can add pages and edit the ones produced by the pre-built site software. This allows you to get a site up and running (and hopefully getting indexed and making you a little money) while you build the your own unique pages. After they are up and running, you can always allow access to the pre-built pages through a link to "Additional Info" or "Articles". There are two well known packages that do this for you. Content Website Builder is the least expensive, and it builds revolving content, ad optimized pages for you on just about any topic. You can click the link above to find out more, get a free demo version to try out, and get a $30 discount off the regular price. Site Builder Elite is better known and more expensive, but it does generate "better" looking pages, and includes more advertising types and SEO features. You can incorporate your own content into the pages you build, simply by uploading articles to your server. You can find out more about it and actually watch a demo of a web site being built with it, by clicking the link above. I wouldn't recommend this software for a permanent, complete site solution, but it can give you a quick start, and then continue to add content, value and perhaps some income to your completed web site.

If you'd like, print out this page and look it over to decide what you want to do as far as the method of building your website. You might decide to do two or three different options. For instance, you might build a "quick and dirty" site using a pre-built software package, then refine it using a WSIWYG editor, and then add a blog later. Whatever you do, tailor it to your comfort level, and to your product(s) and market. This is one decision you have to make for yourself.

Since there is no way to know exactly how you're going to be building your particular web site, in the next section of "Build It!" I'll walk you through each method, pointing out some tips and tricks for each method, and list some additional places you can go for more information. Contiue to Build It page 2...