Design My Own Website

Archive for the ‘Build My Own Website’ Category

Creating your web site can be a tricky process. It is getting easier and easier today with more software available to you.  However, for many people they would rather do what they do best whether it’s being a dentist, a photographer, or a businessman.

My Tips For Getting Your website online quickly

For that reason it seem to still be cost effective for these folks to choose a web design company.  Unless you run a web-based business, you probably do not have web design experience within your company. Building your web site will take time and a little homework!

To create a web site for your business, follow these steps:

1. Establish your goals
2. Determine your budget
3. Pick a web design company (and usually with this a web hosting company)

Establish Your Goals

Before you begin looking for company to help you design and build your web site, take the time to understand the goals of your web site. This will be extremely important to help set expectations with the web design company you choose.  Web user psychology is very important when taking into account what you want your site to do.  Is the goal for users to buy?  To subscribe?  Or …?

In order to set your web site goals, ask yourself the following questions:

• Why do you want a web site?
• What do you want your users to do when they get to your website?
• Who is your target demographic?
• What is your industry?
• Who are your competitors?
• Do they already have web sites? If so, what do they look like?
• How soon do you want your web site?
• What happens if you never create a web site for your business?

For many businesses, the online web site presence is the last piece of the puzzle to success.

Take the time to answer each of the above questions and if you have time, write the answers down on a sheet of paper. These are the same questions most web design companies will ask you before they begin to create your site. If you have these questions answered up front, you will have some criteria for choosing the right web design company.

Determine Your Budget

How much do you want to spend on your web site. web sites can cost you anywhere from $100 to $100,000 depending upon what you want it to do. Know your spending constraints before you begin negotiating with design companies.

Check Out web design Companies:  Review their Portfolios

A well established web design company will have a solid portfolio of web sites that they have created for other clients. Ask for links to other site the design company has created and review each one. Do you like what you see? Do the sites have a style that appeals to you? In addition to reviewing web sites, ask for customer references. And remember, what you see and personally like MAY NOT be what is right for users coming to your site.  This has to be figured out in the section above as far as what you plan to do with the website.

Comparison Shop

Pricing for creating a web site can vary. Typically, web design companies will charge one of three ways:

• Time and materials: price is variable based on the actual number of hours spent working on your site.
• Fixed Price: some design companies will charge you a fixed fee based on a fixed set of requirements.
• A La Cart Pricing: some design companies will charge “by the page” or “by function”.  This can allow you as the web master to have some flexibility within your budget.

Lastly, get everything in writing.

And do not finalize the deal until you understand all of the costs up front. Also make sure that you understand what “done” means.

As an incentive for both parties, and to split the risk amongst both the designer and yourself, structure partial payments at certain milestones.

There are thousands of web designers across the country and they should all fight feverously for your business! If a web design company dismisses any of your questions regarding their design process, pricing, or client references, take your business elsewhere!  Good luck with designing your own website and building your website for online!

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One of the appeals of making money online is that it does not take a lot of money upfront.  It still takes a lot of time, but money wise even if you pay for services and help, it is still much cheaper than running your traditional storefront busienss.  However, you can actually do fairly well with little to no money spent using Google Adsense and various free blog sites.

The first thing to do is get approved by Google Adsense.  This involves submitting your website for approval and most of the time you cannot use a free blog for this.  You will need a nicely constructed self-hosted website to get approval.

One exception:

Blogger.com Blogs

Not long after Google bought Blogger.com, they made AdSense available to Blogger blog owners.

The big bonus of this is not only is it free, and not only do Google and Yahoo crawl the blogs quickly, but Google is fine with approving Blogger.com blogs for Adsense!

So if you’re looking to get started with AdSense and not spend much money, Blogger is a great way to get started.

Before I talk about how to setup a Blogger blog for AdSense, though, let me tell you what an RSS feed is and how it works.  This is important for setting up your free blog.

An RSS feed is basically a list of all of the recent posts made to your blog.

People can use “RSS Aggregators” to keep up with new posts on your blog. Websites can also syndicate your posts by checking your feed for new articles and then reposting on their blog.  This is one method of “auto-blogging” (blogging on auto pilot) to give blogs fresh content.  It is a win win situation since the publisher can get “fresh” content on auto pilot while you get your posts syndicated.  With Blogger blogs, RSS fees are built in so you do not need to do anything to get it to work.

First,  figure out what topic the blog will focus on.

You can blog about products, create product reviews, or just blog about your hobbies.  The main thing is to blog about something you enjoy and are passionate about because money won’t necessarily come rolling in right away. It is important to be consistent with your blogging.  If money is coming in, that is a great motivator to keep blogging.  If money is nto coming in, then it is your passion that will keep you with it until the money comes in.  Brainstorm your skills and interests to determine what you would enjoy writing about. It’s important that you like to write about it, since you will have to do so to build up the blog!

Now you are ready to create your blog.

From the Blogger homepage click the “Create Your Blog Now” link and follow the step by step instructions.  This is very straightforward and you will have the framework of your blog up and running in no time.

When you choose your blog URL, you can come up with a clever name as your brand.  However, for marketing purposes, you can also choose “keywords” to be in yur URL.  For example, if you’re creating a blog about dog training tips, then you could check to see if  “dogtrainingtips.blogspot.com” is available, or some variant of it such as “myawesomedogtrainingtips.blogspot.com”.   Having your keywords in your blog title will give you a boost in search engines.

From here, you also want to choose a template which suits your blog theme.  Just think about readers that come to your blog and what they would be looking for and choose a theme that fits your blog, not one that distracts from it.  You can always pick a plain one also just to get your blog up and running and then change it later.  Changing your blog theme is as easy as clicking a few buttons.  Once the blog is created, then click on the “Templates” tab and select one.

To further setup your blog, there are some various settings you can now set.

On the “Basic” settings tab, set your blog title to the keywords you want to show up for in the search engines. That will help you get ranked.  So an example blog title would be “My Awesome Dog Training Tips”.

You can also give your description here as well.  Include your keywords, but make it a “human friendly” blog description (this will also help you get your blog Adsense approved).  An example would be: “Welcome to my blog!  I am a dog lover and come from a family of dog lovers.  In this blog I will give you my awesome dog training tips I have accumulated over the years”.

Not only will this help your blog more readable, but the RSS feed will show this description and help people choose your blog to syndicate or add to their RSS readers.

One very important setting is to set “Notify Weblogs” to “Yes”.

This is in the Publishing tab.  You want to set the “Notify Weblogs” to “Yes” so that each time you create a new post, notifications are sent out to the Weblogs site (which in turn is crawled by many other spiders).  This is an easy and automated way to let the internet at large now you have updated your blog.

Another setting is to accurately set your archiving to reflect how often you post

Set your archiving to daily if you post every day, or weekly if you only post every few days.  And by the way, you should aim to post almost daily if you can.  The more content, the more often search engines come, the better for traffic and Adsense clicks and thus revenue.

Here is a very important tip about the site feed:  Use the short feed.

By using the short feed, only a summary or description is shown in your RSS feed.  If people want to read more, they need to come to your site.  If they come to your site, they may click on an Adsense ad.  For this reason you want to make your blog titles compelling and your post description compelling as well.   Also the first 50 words or so will be seen so these need to be your hooks to get readers to your blog.

And now: Google Adsense

After you have a few posts set up, you can click on the “AdSense” link and apply for one straight from the blog instead of having to go to Google.com to apply. YES!  This is very convenient!

From there it’s just a matter of pasting the Adsense code into your blog and Voila!  You now have a monetized Google Adsense blog on a free blog out there that can make you money!

In Making Money Blogging – Part 1, I discussed pay per click advertising companies (e.g. google adsense). In Making Money Blogging – Part 2, I discussed affiliate networks (e.g. commission junction).

In this blog, I will be explaining how you can get paid to write a blog for a specific company, or about a specific product (for example – you would be asked by a toothpaste company to write a blog about cool mint toothpaste). This is the primary way that most people will make money from their blogs – and it can be a fair bit of money as well (the top earners at blogitive & pay per post earn up to $US1000 per week – just form their blogs).

This sounds a difficult task to achieve (getting a company to ask you to write a blog about their products), and one would expect that you would need a very well know blog to achieve this – but in fact it is very easy, and you don’t need to have a “known blog” to be able to write for a specific company.

How do you go about this? Well – there are several blogging companies, that will accept an established blog* into their “network of bloggers”, and will send you different topics to blog about ,depending on the type of blog that you have (for example – you may have a shopping blog, and be asked to write about some new electronic equipment from Company Bravo).

*An established blog is based on a number of factors, which differ depending on the blogging network you choose. As an example – blogsvertise accept blogs that are 1 month old, blogitive accepts blogs that are 3 months old & have a certain amount of traffic – read more on the requirements below.

If you apply to a number of different blogging network companies, or have a number of different blogs – you can make a fair bit of money (for example – you may get 3 blogs at $5 each from blogitive, and another 5 blogs at $7 each from pay per post, and another blog from blogsvertise at $10) – so you have 9 blogs to write, and make $US 60 doing it).

The other good thing about applying to more than 1 network is that some of the networks require that you write 2 blogs in-between blogs for them. For example if you write one blogitive post, you need to write a further 2 non-blogitive posts before you can write another blogitive post. If you are also a member of pay per post, and blogsvertise, you could write one blogitive, one pay per post, one blogsvertise and then another blogitive post (which means all of your blogs for the day are paid). It takes a bit of juggling but can certainly be done.

The following companies offer paid blogging opportunities:

http://www.blogitive.com Blogitive have several opportunities for bloggers. You don’t need to say that the blog has been sponsored, and you don’t need to write nice things about the product (i.e. you can write that product x is awful and should never have been invented). You are generally paid $US5 per blog. Requirements are as follows: – Blog must be 3 months old – The Blog must receive (or can receive) some level of traffic – The blog must be indexed in the Google and Yahoo search engines. – The blogs must not contain violent, hate related content or be adult natured – The blogs must maintain a minimum of 3 posts per week – You must write 2 other blog posts in between paid blogitive blog posts – Blogs must be active for 1 year (but payments are made at the latest 1 week following the post) – The blogs must not be hosted on the following networks:- Writingup.com, Bloggerparty.com, Blogcharm.com, Clearblogs.com, Xeeks.com, Blogfeast.net, WordPress.com (blogs that use wordpress software but are hosted on individual url’s (e.g. http://www.shoppersclub.co.nz) are acceptable and Geocities.yahoo.com

http://www.payperpost.com Pay per post have probably the biggest range of opportunities on the market for bloggers today. You do need to notate that the blog has been sponsored, and you may be asked to write positively about a product. Payment is from $US4 to whatever the advertiser is willing to offer (e.g. $10, $15 etc..). The advertisers have more leeway at Pay per post, and can specify blogs to have a minimum page rank, traffic range etc (this is great for advertisers, but not so good for new blogs). Requirements are as follows: – You must be 18 or over to participate in Pay Per Post (and have a valid Tax ID if a resident of the United States) – Your blog must be at least 90 days old, verifiable by a third party index of the site – If over 90 days old, your blog must have at least 20 entries in the past 90 days. If just around 90 days old, your blog must have 20 pre-existing entries. – No blogs with gaps over 30 days (no entries posted for 30+ days) will be accepted. – Blogs must remain live for 30 days – you will be paid after 30 days. – You must write 2 other blogs in between a pay per post blog.

http://www.blogsvertise.com Due to being a newer blogging network, Blogsvertise currently have a limited number of opportunities for bloggers. However, they do tend to offer more money when they do offer blog posts (e.g. $US 7.50, $US 10.00). Requirements are as follows: – Blogs must be 30 days old – Blog entries must be permanent – You will be paid after 30 days (once the blogs have been verified). – Blogs must not be adult related – The blog posts are not required to be positive (i.e. you can negatively review a website or product) – You are not required to say that the blog has been sponsored

[http://www.creamaid.com] Creamaid is great in that there are NO requirements. Anyone & everyone can write a blog about any of the creamaid products. The advertiser (rather than the blogging network) will review your blog after your write and approve/disapprove it (I’ve never heard of one been disapproved yet – but I guess if you are writing very negatively about a product it may just be…).

As well as writing a full blog on a topic, you can also place text links on your blog (so you would place a text link at the bottom of your blog, or the sidebar of your blog, rather than writing an entire blog about the subject). The good thing about text links is that you set the price. If someone wants to advertise on your site, they will have to pay what you ask. If this suits your blog or yourself best, some networks to look at are: – http://www.text-link-ads.com – http://www.textlinkbrokers.com – http://www.linkadage.com

And… that my friends – are the most common paid blogging networks in the blogosphere today.

And… that is also the end to my Making Money Blogging Series – keep tuned for more money making opportunities.

Shirlene Moore

If Ya Want – Making Money Working from Home

Author: Shirlene Moore
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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I’m an entry level freelancer and am trying to figure out some rough pricing.

I get this question a lot. Web Design contracting is not that difficult. The “hardest” part is getting clients.

As far as charging, it really depends on the type of website and how much maintenance.

Web Design As A Contract Job Can Be A Good Source Of Income

If you’re looking to do just local ma-and-pa type shops and professional services (like dentists) and throwing up a brochure type site with nothing too fancy, I would say you could charge $20 a month for everything. Some months they will want a lot of work, some months they won’t need any work.

So you might want to try just one or two and see how many hours you spend on maintenance and then from there adjust your pricing depending on how much time you find spending on maintenance.

However, if you use WordPress, much of the maintenance can be done by the client. WordPress content management is easy to use.

I would say that the initial build of the site you could easily charge $500 for, especially for small brochure sites for professional services type clients: a dentist, chiropracter, physical therapist, etc. You could do $500 for a professional service site (WordPress) and then $10 to $20 a month for maintenance.

Good luck and have fun!

It really depends on the purpose of your site and your timeline – if it’s not overly complex, you can do it yourself. Otherwise you will have to get a professional.

This is by far my favorite web design resource “Web Design Mastery” which I talk about often on my own blog.

The first part of Web Design Mastery, “Planning your website” , is exactly what you’re looking for as far as designing your site. It will also give you some good info if you end up going with a professional so you can speak the same language and know what kinds of questions to ask.

The rest of the resource is helpful if you will build your own site, it won’t be much help if you go with a professional in which case I’d leave it up to you if it’s worth $67 to buy it. I’m sure the info is out there for free or cheaper but I pretty much use “web design Mastery” for a lot so I don’t know what else would be out there. If your timeline is pretty liberal and you are on a budget, definitely keep looking.

As far as tips and tricks: Web Usability is very important and I think it is often not thought about enough.

I did write a quick article on a few common Dos and Donts (based off of “Web Design Mastery”) .. it’s on my blog but here’s the quick version of the Don’ts (and it might be common sense except for the last one)

Don’t:
poor load time
poor browser compatibility (i.e. too complicated)
slow loading graphics
too many graphics
too many animations
busy distracting backgrounds
poor use of frames
too much advertising
large welcome banners (even your own!)
overuse of java
overuse of any technology for that matter
confusing layout and usability ****

This last one is tricky because even if your site is nice and clean it can still be confusing. As an example, if you go to a bunch of membership sites where you need to register for an account, you’ll know what I mean – some of them have very very easy to find “Register” or “Sign up Now” buttons, others are very hard to find. Usually these should be in the upper right. Most “function” buttons (login, logout, register, etc..) are found in the upper right.. Put them somewhere else and users conditioned to see htem in the upper right will be confused. Also, why use “Sign Up” (two words) when “Register” works just as well and lets the user think less.

Another example of “confusing” or “not confusing” layout: shopping cart buttons. Thanks to Amazon and some of the early and big stores, people have been conditioned to see a shopping cart and know to click on it to go to their cart. So the words “Your Cart” or “Go To Your Cart” will be confusing. Even though the design is clean, it can be confusing.

Hope this is helpful!

You can definitely do it yourself and pretty cheaply. Credit card transations is a bit more on the complicated side, PayPal is much easier, at least in the beginning.

1) Get a domain . I recommend godaddy.com

http://godaddy.com

2) Get a hosting account. I can recommend hostmonster:

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

I’ve used a handful of webhosting companies and to be honest their support was the first that seemed to really be on top of things. Whichever hosting company you choose, I say go to the live chat at odd hours and ask presales questions and see what you think of the company. That is why I would pick hostmonster (even over the very popular hostgator)

Paypal makes it very easy to take credit card transactions online

3) Get a paypal account. You will see a “Merchant Services” tab and you can generate your own link and button and PayPal will give you the HTML to use

http://paypal.com

4) If you know HTML, you can design it on your own. Otherwise you can use WordPress to get yourself going quickly (and then use html and graphics skills to really spice up the site). WordPress is limiting if you want a lot of interaction with the user but it’s good for general layout ideas.

http://wordpress.com

There are actually some great HTML resources out there too. My personal favorite is Web Design Mastery because when I first bought it I was expecting to open up the book and learn HTML right away and instead the entire first book had NO HTML in it – all she talked about was what makes effective web design for marketing and usability – that was new to me and I really liked that approach

Good luck!

Search Engine Optimization, or seo, is a relatively new concept in the world of web design, but if you want a successful, profitable website, it’s something you cannot ignore. Competition for rankings on popular search engines like Google is fierce, and without SEO, your website is at a huge disadvantage. So when exactly, in the process of setting up your new website, should you seek an SEO specialist? The short answer: the sooner the better.

Ideally, you should consult with an seo expert before you meet with your web designer, since your idea or vision of what you want in your website might not be seo friendly at all. For example, a flashy site with lots of sound and graphics does nothing for improving your rankings on the search engines. Reviewing the basics with an seo company early on can save you endless heartache and expense down the road.

The next step – when presenting your ideas to a designer, you should also include your seo expert. If it is not feasible to all meet in person, a phone conference can easily be arranged. Some designers might try to convince you that they are SEO knowledgeable, but it is truly better to hire a separate company to handle SEO matters, as it is very unlikely that web designers have the time to stay up to date on the constantly changing details of the seo world.

A good way to proceed with the design is to arrange in advance points at which your seo expert will check back on the website’s progress. That way, you are ensuring that your site is seo friendly at each stage of the game, and you avoid wasting time and money by having your designer re-design parts of your site later on.

Finally, make sure your seo expert is involved in the final review process before you seal the deal. Corrections are often much more expensive when done after the site is launched.

By involving an SEO expert from the start of your web design, you are giving your site a huge advantage of being optimized from day one, which of course, exponentially increases your chances for profit and success.

NewSunSEO : Internet Marketing NYC

http://NewSunSEO.com

NewSunSEO develops and utilizes search engine optimization strategies that result in top placements. With extensive knowledge about the underlying structure of search engines, we help your website gain exposure, added traffic and more business. NewSunSEO uses the top current technologies with highly effective, ethical methods that are proven to work continually.

Visit our Blog to read, comment, and/or ask questions about Internet Marketing at

[http://SEO-Blog.NewSunSEO.com]

Written by Terri Polk at NewSunSEO, Inc.

Author: Terri Polk
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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A common question that comes up:

“What’s the difference between web design and graphic design?”

The answer:

Graphic Design tends to be with layout, with print, or has to do with logos. It has to do a bit with spatial design. Web Design is the same.

The main difference (and it’s a big one!!!) is the user psychology is different.

Someone looking at a can of coke has a different psychology than someone looking at a website. Web user psychology is a whole different ballgame people.

A great analogy of user psychology I like to reference which helps people “get it” is road rage. You could be the sweetest person in the world, but you get behind a car and some M’F'er cuts you off and you are a sailor’s worst nightmare. Something about cars. Something about the isolation. About being anonymous.

Being behind a computer is the same. There is a whole different psychology there. People expect to find things quickly (and more often than not for free too!).

That being said, Web Usability is a huge huge topic that requires a lot of research and studying if you want to be a really good web designer. There are equations, math, and psychology all involved.

However, if you want some light (and fun!) reading, the very best reference I can recommend is “Web Pages That Suck“.

They take a look at actual sites that are designed poorly and explain WHY they are designed poorly. And sometimes it’s quite humorous. Sometimes it’s humorous especially if you’ve been a web developer for some time because you KNOW you’ve committed these same errors!

This is a really fantastic series of books. I can’t recommend it enough. If you have a web designer friend, this is the perfect book. It’s a great combination of humor and a lot of great web usability/web psychology lessons all rolled into a nice big colorful book! Go check it out!

GO CHECK OUT “Web Pages That Suck” !! 

GO CHECK OUT “SON OF Web Pages That Suck” !!

SEO or Search Engine Optimization starts with the process of making the website search engine friendly by enhancing the quality of website to target useful traffic to the website from major SEs like Google, Yahoo and Bing. If a website is designed as per the seo techniques, its more likely to achieve top rankings in shorter time as compared to the website that are not designed with basic SEO factors and needs to be changed as per the requirement.

The process of SEO mainly starts with the planning and designing of a website and it involves necessary seo steps which helps the website to get rank in the top results of search engines for desired keywords.

Importance of Search Engine Optimization:

Around 75% of the websites available on Internet get their major share of traffic from SEs, this traffic is known as organic or natural traffic and all of the above this traffic free and utmost quality as the visitors have searched for the terms on SEs and landed on your website. SEs are therefore the primary source of information on the websites. Most of these sites are on the top 10 SERPs of the searches performed by Search engines for the desired keyword. It is therefore very essential to get ranked in the top page of the major SEs to attain necessary traffic and quality visitor to your website.

Strategies on search engine Optimization (SEO):

search engine optimization is the process of converting your site to search engine comfortable. The major steps involved in SEO are as follows:

On-Page Optimization – In on-page SEO process website pages are optimized with the most useful and relevant keywords by creating Title, Meta tags, content optimization, adding alt texts, header tags, etc. Internal linking of the site pages also plays an important role in proper navigation for the visitors. Creation of robots.txt file, HTML and XML sitemap is also important steps of on-page seo process.

Off Page Optimization – In Off Page Optimization, the website is promoted through other websites by performing quality and relevant link building, that can be done in many ways like – link exchange (one-way, reciprocal), directory submissions, article syndication, press release submissions, social media
marketing, etc.

If a website is designed in such a way that it supports all the basic and advanced seo factors then the chances of getting top rankings on major search engines increases a lot. The visitors coming to the website will feel more comfortable and their probability of conversion also increase.

VSpaceLab is specialist in SEO based web designing and internet marketing helping people to design their websites to achieve maximum benefits from their website in the form of quality leads and revenue. Contact for San Antonio SEO based web designing, seo, SEM, internet marketing services by San Antonio web design company.

Colin Francis is marketing for VSpaceLab, specialist in web designing and internet marketing with an interest in writing articles on web design, seo, SEM, internet marketing that can help you to find best San Antonio web design company.

Author: Colin Francis
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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