Archive for November, 2009

Just finished your first website? So it is the time to have a look for some hosting and make a choise. Your first question doubtless will be whether to select free or paid hosting service.

Let’s take a look at some benefits and downsides of these solutions.

Free website hosting :
( + ) It’s absolutely free. You do not want to pay for web site name.
( – ) Your URL will be something similar to username.freehost.com or freehost.com / user name. Even though you save the cost of paying for a domain, if you move your site to another supplier in the future you can lose some or all of your organic search engine traffic. There are ways around that and to fix that, but it can be convoluted depending on how your site is built out
( – ) Your supplier will doubtless include advertisements to your pages – customarily one or two banners, infrequently popup windows. If you intend to use banner exchange on your website read conscientiously their T&Cs. Some free hosts doesn’t permit it.
( – ) a large amount of free hosts can change their Terms and Conditions with little to no warning
( – ) Sometimes the free hosts cancel their free service and longer offer paid hosting only. In this situation you have only two choises – pay them or loose your internet site.

Paid website hosting :
( + ) You can host your own domain. If you make a decision to change the website hosting supplier in the future, you simply transfer the domain to the new supplier and do not loose your traffic.
( + ) Most paid hosts offer twenty-four / seven support thru email or live discuss and many of them provide toll-free telephone support.
( + ) you should expect better uptime then on free host. Some paid hosts offer uptime guarantee. In other words, you get what you pay for.
( – ) Paid hosting cost cash ) Before you make the call if select free or paid host you must answer this question : how large ambitions have I got with my website? If you’re beginning small private page for your friends consist of some *.html files then a free host will be adequate. In case you intend to run significant business site, need PHP, database and do not need adverts on the site I like to recommend to have a look for quality paid host.

But really how much is paid hosting? If you prepay a year in advance it can be as little as $4 a month! That is basically giving up, say, one Starbucks latte a month!

I honestly do not know why people would go for free webhosting when there are so many advantages to paid webhosting and yet I see questions on this all the time at the various forums and answer sites – what is the best free web host, etc..etc. I can see using a free webhost for a blog (like blogger.com or wordpress.com) but other than that, I don’t really see the benefit of free webhosting.

Check out some great webhosting companies here:

http://www.designmyownwebsite.net/go/bluehost.html

http://www.designmyownwebsite.net/go/hostgator.html

http://www.designmyownwebsite.net/go/hostmonster.html

Coming soon: more on dedicated vs reseller vs “regular” web hosting.

Kind of a “bane of my existence” for many online entrepreneurs. This question happened to come from someone running a dating website. The question was on http://answers.yahoo.com (where I seem to be hanging out a lot). Here was my answer for him which he chose as the best answer:

You didn’t post a link to your website so I couldn’t take a look, but people who come to your website probably are not interested in clicking on your ads. One thing about adsense is people know they are ads and maybe they’re more interested in dating and meeting people.

I’d suggest finding a few products you can sell (affiliates products) that may be of interest to your users. Something about how to pick up women, etc.. etc..

Also find ways to market your site for free without paying adwords because than you can get organic traffic instead of adwords traffic. There are a lot of resources for this. Search for how to generate backlinks… examples like
1) submit articles to article directories with link back to site
2) answer dating questions on answers.yahoo.com with link to site (if applicable, don’t want to get banned)
3) social bookmarking
4) if you have a for pay product (like a membership), create a generous affiliate program
5) hold some sort of event for your forum users, maybe local events? And advertise it in the events section on craigslist

Those were some of the ideas I posted to him.

The thing with adsense is you need to have a site where people will want to click on the ads. In this case, a relationship site, you have an end product. Why would people want to click away from a relationship site? They want to find a relationship. The only reason they would buy something is something that will increase the likelihood of them getting a relationship such as a membership fee with increased features (ala classmates.com) or possibly an ebook, something about now that you have a successful first date, what do you do next?

People do definitely click on the ads though – as this online businessman found out because he definitely was getting the clicks (and paying for it), but then trying to make money on adsense alone from that would be very tough.

If you are going for adwords, make sure you have a sellable end product and not just an adsense site.

Good luck!

Hello, Scotty here ..

Since a few of you inquired, this is a really good web design book:

web design Mastery = Effective Web Site Design

I’ll admit that I have moved on to other projects and other web design “tactics”, but I would say that book is my foundational reference and it is really good.

So for you impatient people who just want to be told how to design your own website, here’s the course to pick up now. It’s called web design Mastery by Shelley Lowery. Seriously this course is pretty much the foundation of my effective web design knowledge.

What really stands out to me about Shelley Lowery’s web design Mastery:
It has a very synergistic “big picture” approach. What I think most web design books consider “beyond the scope” Shelley includes it all.

The first section itself is the “Preparation” ebook. An entire first ebook learning nothing about html or technical design, but asking you to think what the purpose of your site is. I absolutely LOVE that and still use that to this day

Also Web Design Mastery introduced me to internet marketing! She has an entire ebook on marketing! It is because of this that I actually have moved on to “bigger and better”.

I don’t know any other web design ebook or course that does this.

Or at least the ones I’ve bought (both books and ebooks) were not this complete and concise and “big picture”.

Which leads me to the third thing I like about web design Mastery: It is compartmentalized and organized well

You get fifteen ebooks, not one big long book. Each ebook is specifically dedicated to a topic.

Here is a screen shot of the ebooks you get. (Hopefully she does not mind me “leaking” this). Having separate ebooks really makes it easy to read, digest, AND more importantly refer back to.

That’s why I really consider web design Mastery as a “complete” solution for learning Effective web design

Click here and check out Web Design Mastery by Shelley Lowery

A BONUS DOWNLOAD WITH PURCHASE!

She has a money back guarantee on her product. You already can’t lose. And she offers some nice little surprise bonuses with her product.

And now I will offer you a bonus too! As I have gotten in to more internet marketing, I will be putting up for sale some products in the next few days: Article Marketing Magic ($17) and Article Writing Magic ($17). It’s a great introduction to some internet marketing basics and making money with content. It will go great with your web design Mastery book as a foray into internet marketing and making money with the websites you want to design.

I have already been selling copies of these offline for $17 each. When I launch them on my side I plan to have an introductory price of $7 each.

If you email me your receipt of your web design Mastery purchase, I will give one of these products (heck maybe BOTH) Article Marketing Magic and Article Writing Magic …FOR FREE !!

So while you could wait for me to launch my two products and then buy them from me (which I’d appreciate), I’m offering you this $34 incentive of free gifts for you to check out Shelly’s book. I feel like since web design Mastery was so helpful in getting me my start, I owe it to the books to do this (that sounds funny the way it reads but you know what I mean) . And of course I want to encourage all of you to save some headache and get this nice complete system.

Click Here and check out Web Design Mastery by Shelley Lowery

Check it out! You’ve got nothing to lose and so much to gain.

WebDesignerScotty

Hello, Scotty here!

So I talked a bit about me in the first post, now it’s time to talk about you.

If you came here, hopefully you didn’t just stumble on here randomly (and if you did, well.. welcome!). But you came here in search of something and it’s probably because you’re intersested in making your own website.

There are definitely steps to it. It was definitely overwhelming for me trying to design a webiste because I had no idea where to start, and it wasn’t for a lack of looking on the web to get ideas on how to make a website or build a website. I think there was just too much information and as much as I could learn how to draw tables in HTML, my learning didn’t really give me a clear cut way of how to build a website and furthermore get it out there for people to see.

Eventually I found some great resources and a coach – and that definitely was a moment of glory for me (really a moment of “HOLY CRAP! You mean all these years I should have been thinking about THIS?”).

I think most people out there (esp. when you read forums and answer websites) think that getting into web design is just about learning, learning, learning . And it really is so much more – and here’s my special list of knowledge to gain:

1) learn sufficient technical skills (you don’t need to learn all of them)
2) learn about marketing
3) learn about user psychology
4) learn about getting traffic
5) and, if it pertains to you, learn systems about making money

Learning to put these things together is what I would call web design – or more accurately effective web site design..

That’t the key word so I’ll repeat it again

Effecctive Web Site design

That’s all for now, a bit short on time but I have a bunch more for next time! Till then!

Just a quick “Hello World” to you all.

Scotty here.. and Welcome to my web site.

My hope is here I can share my experience learning to design my own websitesand pass along some tips and tricks to you so you can create your own website – and much more!

Though I’ve been a longtime user of the internet, my web design really didn’t start standing out until a few years ago. I had tinkered around a lot but with the economy I started really focusing in on my website design. At first I was a bit fearful that it would stop being fun, but after I figured out how to actually do effective website design to make great web pages, it became quite fun (and fortunately made me a bit of money too!)

I’m looking forward to building out this site. I am hoping to share some great tips with you about web pages
and I am positive I’ll learn something myself in the process.

Thanks for coming!

HELLO WORLD!
Welcome to my website