To keep your knuckles from turning too white, I'd like to make a suggestion for eliminating an unnecessary expense: Fire your webmaster.

A webmaster unnecessary? Could it be?

In the olden days, when you wanted a website you hired a web guy (and it was typically a guy), who built and stored everything on his own individual computer using internet marketing tools. The problem with this was that everything was attached to a particular computer and a particular webmaster. If you wanted to make changes, you needed to work through your webmaster — who, for some reason or other, usually wasn't available when you needed him. You wanted to hold a holiday sale, for instance, but he didn't work around the holidays…you get my drift. This led to a lot of frustration, which in many cases continues to this day.

Now, though, instead of frustrated waiting, there is a whole new option. It is entirely possible to get a website up quickly, or convert an existing one, and make changes as needed — without a webmaster. Using a program called WordPress, you can make your site live on the internet, which allows it to be completely accessible.

What do I mean by completely accessible? Here's an example: I have a desktop computer at home and two laptops in my office. With the administrative, password-protected login, my staff and I can create pages or make changes, anytime or anywhere we choose. We can use a PC or a Mac. We can add pictures, or even cut and paste straight from MS Word. It's simple, effective and economical.

As a business owner, your website may be like a brochure, used for informational purposes, or it may be a direct sales internet marketing tools. Whatever your trade, draw from many different technologies to help you focus and create the website you envision.

Using WordPress, you can:

• Create your website/blog without a webmaster
• Build your list by adding email marketing to your website
• Sell your products on your website
• Add detailed statistics and tracking to your website
• Add audio to your website without the need for an audio service
• Add videos to your website
• Add PDFs to your website
• Password protect pages on your website
• Create separate logins for your assistants
• Put up your own banner ads on your website

Web hosting:
    In very simple terms getting your website on the internet is called web hosting. Every website that you have ever seen, or will ever see is actually stored on a computer somewhere in the world. When you type the address of that website in your browser’s address bar, the website is fetched from that computer to yours. Just like that, your website will be placed on a computer somewhere too. That is known as web hosting.

Web host:
    The company/person who is the owner of the computer where you want your website to be stored or “hosted” is called the web host. It is the web host who offer you packages and take your money and give you hosting and their technical support.

Types Of Web Hosting:
    There are two major types of web hosting. Shared hosting and Dedicated hosting.
        (i).Shared Hosting:
In Shared web hosting, your website is stored on a computer where there are other websites. Means you are sharing a web server with other people like you who have acquired shared hosting.
        (ii).Dedicated Hosting:
In Dedicated  web hosting, you acquire a full web server for your hosting needs. Which means only your website will be hosted on that computer and no one else’s.

Technical Terms You Should Be Aware Of:

Technical Support:
    This is the help and support department of the web hosting company. This is a very important aspect of web hosting and must be fully functional and fast.

Bandwidth:
    This is the amount of data transfer allowed to your website, every month. Usually around 10GB is fine for beginner websites.

Web Space:
    Web space is the amount of space which will be provided to you for your web site. Your web site’s size cannot exceed this given web space limit.

Domain Name:
    Domain name is the word/words which user will enter in the browser to access your website. Domain names are registered separately from the web hosting. Sometimes the web hosts offer to register the domain names too.

Flash:
    Flash is a popular media type mostly used for animations, it is developed by Macromedia. It is commonly used because it requires less space and downloading time with great graphics and animations.

FrontPage:
    A very popular website design and publishing tool (software) developed by Microsoft.

FTP:
    File Transfer Protocol, the means of transferring or “uploading” your website’s files on the web host’s server.

HTML:
    Hyper Text Markup Language, the basic language in which you will write your website and the language in which the client and the server’s browsers communicate.

Shopping Cart:
    A software designed to take orders from your customers on your website and keeps storing them until they want to check out. The software then charges the customer by the designed method e.g. by taking the customer’s credit card number and charging it for the total product’s amount.

CGI:
    Common Gateway Interface, a processing interface. CGI scripts take information from the user and can process it in multiple ways, including storing the information in a database.

MySQL:
    A popular type of database server, very commonly used with PHP.

ASP:
    Active Server Pages, is a scripting language that enables the web designers to design their pages dynamically with databases implementation.

Control Panel/Website Manager:
    A Control Panel/Website Manager is an online piece of software which enables the web hosting users to manage their web content easily and effectively.

Email Forwarding (Email alias):
    Allows the web hosting user to create a number of apparent email addresses on a certain domain, which in reality are only names pointing to just one original and proper email address of your choice e.g. you can make   mike@mywebsite.com,  sales@mywebsite.com and as many as you like. But in reality they would all be pointing to one real email address e.g. mike@someemailservice.com.

SSL:
    Secure Socket Layer, is a protocol designed to provide a secure, encrypted connections like financial transactions on the internet.

Web Statistics:
    A lot of web hosts provide website statistics for free. These are the statistical data of the users who visit your website. By analyzing this data you would get to know how many visitors viewed your website daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. Other useful information to improve the content and design of your website is also included e.g. the operating system on the machine of each user and the type of web browser they are using.

Above is the basic technical terms that you must know before you head off to buy web hosting. With this knowledge now you can make a decision about which features you want and which ones you don’t, for your website.
 

The professionalism you demonstrate personally determines whether or not you have the desired influence on your particular audience. People surfing the web usually judge a site based on how well it has been designed, which is why a professionally created website will always give out positive results, and is often the first step you take towards building a successful online business. Let's use an example about outsourcing a design for a canon mp560 review site.

It isn't enough for a company to simply set up a website – you need a website that is eye-catching and very easy to navigate. If you have one that is all style and no substance, this will be ineffectual for you in the long run. To effectively survive in the market and beat the competition, you need to have a site that contains high quality content, good design that grabs the visitor's attention and has the right level of functionality. The website needs to strike the right balance between presenting the brand image of your company and ensuring that the customers are comfortable using it. It is to your advantage that outsourcing is seeing a great deal of competition these days, especially among the offshore companies that specialize in web design. This means you can get the best deal out of it. Because many of these companies are working to stay in business, they will strive to provide you with everything that you need. You can leverage this simple reality to upgrade your site in terms of content and appearance. Your in house team won't be able to achieve this and give so much quality.

Increased risk management is another advantage that stems from outsourcing your work. There are inherent risks associated with the design process of your site. Your business image will be on the line with your design, so allowing professionals to handle the job means far less risk. Apart from this, you have complete control over the project and you can monitor it from time to time to make sure it is completed in the time period determined by you, in the set budget. You simply wouldn't have the same amount of control over the work being done if you tried to do it in-house. When you know how your project is progressing, you're able to make any changes that don't suit your preferences as they are needed.

Besides outsourcing the web design work, a small business should also consider outsourcing the search engine optimization part of their site. If you want people to find entries for your company in the search engines, you will need to make sure they are able to. Once the web design part is taken care of and everything is in place, you should put your focus on driving more sales/leads for your business. Everyone is looking for cost effective ways to increase marketing and Internet marketing is a great way to reach your target market and connect them with your website.

If you seriously think that you want to have a formidable web presence, you will need a site that sends the right message to your patrons and is designed in order to appeal to them. A critical accomplishment over the longer haul, carving out a share of your niche market and developing a good brand is achieved in large part as a result of your website.

Let's start at the beginning.  A, What You See Is What You Get, (WYSIWYG) html editor is software that turns standard word documents into properly coded html.  The coded html is then ready to be, file transfer protocol, (FTP) up to your server to be displayed on a website. 

This software is very popular because you don't have to learn html code at all.  In fact it is so popular that the number of html code monkeys, (People who actually know html coding) is decreasing.  Also it allows average people to become webmasters, I use that term loosely, to build websites very easily.

With a WYSIWYG editor basically if you can use MS word well you can build websites.  The software allows you to integrate graphics, web forms, site maps and much more with just a click of the mouse.  I in fact use an html editor and it changed everything in my business for me.

I can now register a domain name and build a website and have it up on the web in a week.  Now, large content sights take longer and require more time but the software lets you build a large a content sight as you want.  Some of the html editors on the market actually have page duplication wizards.  This lets you build html coded web pages a dozen or more at a time if you want.

Your starting to get the idea an what a WYSIWYG html editor can do.  Here is why they are also important.  They allow you to build unique websites and web pages.  Unique websites are very important if you want to have your website listed high on the search engines. 

Google and other large search engines like to see unique or different content.  If you are using a template there could be a thousand other people with the same coding and only slightly different content.  You are going to have a tough time getting your website listed high in the search engines listings.

In addition, a lot of the templates require you to host with the website template provider.  If they ever go out of business, so do you. Be careful if you are using this type of arrangement.

When you are looking for the html software you need to find out if it is what I call fully functional. Fully functional means it will have lots of features that help you to build your website to be optimized for the search engines.  Look for the following features.

Integrated FTP, RSS Feed, Site Search, Mobile Site Search, Multi Page Creation, CSS, PHP, Web Forms, Redirect Pages, Link Lists, Siloing, Pop Ups, XML Syndication, Search Engine Site Maps, Site Clean Up to just name a few.

The  best html WYSIWYG editing software has all of this and more. In your search find out what features the software has.  Do your research because having the best software and one that is only half as good will make all the difference.  I can't stress enough that there is a huge difference in the market place.

One last tip, the best is not the most expensive!

1. THE BASIS. Why are you creating a business in the first place? Are you fulfilling a need for certain services that you have observed? What are you trading people for their money?

2. WEB HOSTING. Find a good web hosting site. This should run you about $15 per month, but it is well worth the investment. Most web hosts will help you get a domain name and will provide you with tools that can help you set up a nice looking, professional website very quickly.

3. CONTENT. This can be simple or tricky depending what type of business you are going into and how much you know about the products and services that you are offering. You need to fill your website with content that people can read but that also effect how your site ranks on the web. Putting in key words over and over again will help your site become more attractive to web crawlers more quickly. If you are unsure what words to use, you can either consult with a SEO management company or do some of the legwork yourself and try and determine what keywords best describe the products or services you are providing. You can actually reference other similar websites to learn what relevant content they are using. Also, images are a great selling point, so be sure to include great looking images in your web pages. You can add these using a digital camera or scanner depending on the product.

4. SECURITY. If you are going to be selling something online, then you will need to purchase a security certificate that will allow customers to put in their personal information without cause for concern. Without a secure site, it is not wise to accept personal information through your website because this will open you up to a law suit if an individuals personal information is stolen and misused. This is a must if you wish to take online payments. Your web host can provide you with further information on this issue.

Your new venture will go smoothly with decent web hosting. Search through tons of hosts until you feel sure that you are getting the best web hosting possible.

by JEN BARNUM