I am looking to get a business idea up and out on the web, stage two will be to develop the idea to generate money, but initially I need to keep my costs as low as possible. Can you advise ( I am not a technical person)
Now although the person wants to test an idea I think it is just as relevant to established businesses looking to build a website, and it is for that reason I would like to answer it now instead of waiting for the next newsletter.
Many small business owners are looking for an Internet presence and yet are put of by the high costs of getting a site online. Many professionally designed site cost at least £300 for a very basic site with most costing thousands.
But there is another way!. Instead of spending thousands of pounds on an ‘all singing and dancing’ site, get a quick professional site in place and start promoting it and seeing how it does.
The easiest way to do this is to use WordPress as the platform as it gives you a professional looking site without the need to do any design except perhaps to change a header Image/logo.
To do this all you need to do is to get a domain name and host. I recommend you use the same company for both. In the UK I use One and one (need Linux business hosting package approx £9 per month
includes 3 .uk domain names).
There is a section on the site on how to use WordPress to build a website ,and in the new year I will looking at plugins for SEO to help you get the site ranked.
If you need help with the setup then I offer webmaster services which includes initial WordPress setup.
One of the most common questions I get asked is what do I really need to start building a website. Well the answer is very little and what you need you can get for free as explained in the following video:
Many of us find that we have content in a Word Document or similar and need to copy that content into a Web Page. It is surprisingly easy to do but in doing it you could finish up with a lot of strange looking HTML coding and some strange formatting.
Here a some more questions and answers taken from the newsletter sign up. If you haven’t yet signed up then here is the newsletter link.
How Can I Change My Website?
You have an existing website that was created by someone else and you need to make changes?
The person who created the website for you should have given you the login name and password to access the control panel for the website.
Once you are logged into the control panel you can find out all you need to know about your site including the ftp access logon names and passwords.
What is Source Mode when Editing Web Pages?
Source mode or code as it is sometimes called gives you access to the HTML code. In normal edit mode of web page editors the HTML code is hidden and the text appears just like it does when typing into a word processor.
As a example here are two screenshots of part of this page in normal edit mode and then in source mode.
Normal edit mode
Source or Code Mode
How Do I Connect My Website to The Internet?
This question crops up a lot in many different guises. The website is on the local PC and you want it displayed on the internet.
Many people look for very specific templates like a horse template, dog template etc. Most template sites offer a good selection of very specific templates, but I find most of them too complex for beginners to use.
I prefer to use a simple template and use simple images to set the theme, in particular the header image.
I personally don’t know how, and certainly don’t have the resources for those type of sites. So if you are new to website making I don’t think this type of site is the right one to start with.
How To make money from a Website
There are two methods I use and they are affiliate programs and Google Adsense. Of course they are not the only methods but they will get you started.
How do I get my Website seen by Others
There are two aspects to this. This first is to publish your site on the web, and for this you need a domain name and host.
After that your site will be visible on the web but no one will probably visit it until you start promoting it. Most people use search engines to find websites and hence it is crucial that you get your site listed in the search engines.
However a search engine listing is not enough .. it is just the start. Your site needs to be found when people search and for that to happen you need to optimise your site for the search engines (SEO).
The goal being to appear on the first page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) for your selected search terms (keywords).
As part of my newsletter sign up I invite subscribers to ask their most burning question, and here I provide answers to some of the most common ones. I hope to make this a regular Tuesday feature.
How much does a website Cost?
If you make the website yourself then the only things you will need to pay for are the domain name and the hosting service. Most Hosting providers provide 1 free domain name and so you usually don’t have to pay for that.
The hosting costs are typically $7 per month and domain names cost around $10 per year, so a website typically costs around $100 per year.
Yes you can but only recommend it for Personal/hobby sites. The two tools/providers I recommend you use are www.blogger.com and www.wordpress.com.
I find WordPress better in that although it is a blogging platform it can be configured to look like a standard website. You can find out more about configuring WordPress as a website in the building websites with Wordpress section.
How Do I start?
As with any new skill having the right start is critical to success. Without knowing where to start its very easy to start totally in the wrong place and get completely discouraged.
A few years ago My wife purchased a paint ball day out as a birthday present, I think she must have heard that it hurts when you get shot.
Anyway I went along with several fiends and after hiding for 5 minutes in the first game; for fear of getting shot, I had a really good day out.
So why Am I telliing you this? Well 3 years later I’m still getting emails from the company with their latest offers and special promotions.
This is a small local company, but they understand the importance of collecting email addresses and staying in touch, and although the emails aren’t professioanlly written, I still read them, and I don’t block them.
How much does it cost that company to send me those emails? Practically nothing.
So why aren’t other small businesses doing the same?
I honestly don’t know. I guess that many think its too complex, and don’t think that they can write emails.
The paintballing company stated out using an email client (probably outlook Express). How do I know? Well they made a very basic mistake that isn’t possible using a professional autoresponder.
But that doesn’t matter they learned and improved.
So if you haven’t considered email marketing or have been afraid to try it maybe it’s time you did.
You can find out more in the email marketing section of the site.
And If you haven’t been paintballing yet, it does hurt, but I didn’t tell my wife that as I just might treat her to her own paintballing day.
I was looking at my site using Google webmaster tools and noticed that I had duplicate title tags on some of the pages of my consulting site. Here is what I saw
You should notice that the pages like contact have additional pages with ?wpcf7=json added on.
Further investigation showed that it was probably the contact 7 form plugin causing the problem and the only course of action was to deactivate and un- install the plugin.
I also (using webmaster tools) requested that the duplicate pages be removed and edited my robots.tx file to exclude pages with ?wpcf7=json in them.
cbrown550@Yahoo.co.uk is the contact email address I saw on the white Van in front of me on the school run the other morning.
The van belonged to someone who sells and installs log burning fires. That was easy to tell as it had some very nice (and probably expensive) signwriting on it.
Why do I mention it? Well this tradesman was willing to spend hundres of pounds getting his van professionally done and yet not prepared to spend £2 on his own domain name.
In fairness to the tradesman he is probably unaware that domain names are so cheap and that you can use them for email addresses and not just websites.(see Hosting and email addresses)
It also goes to show that if you have local business then getting a website and a domain name will put you well ahead of the competition as most local businesses just haven’t got it yet.
