Fantastico.

Depending on your host, you might find that you already have a selection of CMSes available and ready to install from your cPanel. Log in, and take a look for the Fantastico script installer. If you have it, then you’ll be able to read a description of each piece of software you have available to you – try out a few of the CMSes to see which ones you like.

Finding a CMS.

If you don’t have Fantastico on your host, or you don’t like what it offers you, don’t worry: there’s plenty of choice out there on the web when it comes to CMS software.

For finding free CMS software, a truly excellent resource is www.opensourcecms.com. At that site, you can use the menu at the side of the page to see lots of open source CMSes running before you commit to downloading them and installing them yourself. Textpattern, Drupal and Plone are very popular right now, so they’re a good place to start.

If you’re considering commercial CMSes as well, then you should take a look at www.cmsmatrix.org, which provides an up-to-date comparison of almost every CMS out there. Be prepared, though, that commercial CMSes can be ridiculously expensive or unnecessarily expensive.

Getting a Custom CMS Built.

If nothing out there seems to meet your needs, you might consider having a web designer build you a custom CMS in a scripting language like Perl or PHP. Any web designer worth their salt should have something basic already that they can build whatever features you want onto. This can be really good when it comes to making your website work the way you want, since the CMS will be built around your website to make it as easy as possible for you to modify.

Using a CMS.

The whole point of a CMS is to make it much easier to add content to your website and to edit the content that’s already there. Once you’ve installed your CMS, you will generally be able to log into its user system using a special admin password. This will add ‘edit’ options to the existing pages of the site, as well as giving you a ‘new page’ link somewhere to allow you to create a new page.

When it comes to actually writing the content of the pages, most CMSes will make it easy for you to copy and paste from programs like Word: they shouldn’t require any special HTML formatting. Some will require you to mark words with special symbols if you want them to be bold or italic, but it shouldn’t be too troublesome.

Changing the design with a CMS usually involves installing a template into a template folder and then selecting it in the options. Creating your own templates can be complicated, depending on what software you’re using, but it shouldn’t be any trouble for a web designer, and most template sites will provide designs in a format suitable for this kind of use

Finding a Hosted CMS.

Once you know which CMS you want, an alternative to installing it on a web host that doesn’t necessarily support it is to do a search and find a host that specifically supports your CMS. You shouldn’t have too much trouble finding a host somewhere that will support you – if nothing else, you might try opensourcehost.com, which supports almost every open source CMS out there.

Using a host solution might be a little more expensive, but it will save you a lot of time in configuration and a lot of problems if anything goes wrong. Using a hosted CMS is one of the quickest ways to set up a website: you simply pay the host, log in, add your content and you’re away.

2. Write Your Web Address on Things. If your business has any physical objects, whether it’s a product, a carrier bag or just the front of your office, make sure to write your web address on there. Even if people don’t keep or remember the exact address, it at least lets them know that your website exists.

3. Give Out Leaflets and Printed materials. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of old-fashioned paper promotion: leaflet as many areas as you can. The chances are that your website is targeted to a specific demographic rather than an area, but the post office will be surprisingly helpful when it comes to getting your leaflets where they need to go, if you ask them. You can find many websites that offer free advertisement with the price of a postage stamps. They are commonly called “fillers” and many Mom targeted websites and groups use this type of helpful free advertisement to help each other advertise. Stuff these fillers in the envelope when you pay your bills. Why not we get spam mail from all the big companies! Leave your leaflets anywhere you can, doctors office, dentist office, bus stop, library, Laundromats, etc . ..

4. Go to Specialist Events. If there’s some kind of trade fair for the industry your website is in, turn up to it and promote your website. While there might not be all that many people there, the ones who are there will be influential, and can get your site talked about.

5. Put your URL on Business Cards. It should go without saying, but once you’ve gone to all that trouble to set up a website, don’t forget to put it on your business cards. After all, if you’re relying on them to get people to phone you, why not give them the option of reading more about you on your website? Your URL should be on ever piece of paper that you use for your business, I would also recommend having it printed on your personal stationeries, this lets everyone you know you have a website.

6. On-Line Communities and Forums. An often overlooked way of getting traffic to your website is to participate on forums related to the subject and put your web address in your signature. This gets you more traffic than you’d think, especially at very popular forums. Many members do get curious enough to click on links found in your signature line.

7. Your Email Signature. If you’ve spent so much time on money on your website why wouldn’t you put a little advertisement blurb and your site link underneath your signature on all of your emails. Create one in your email program that gets added to every email message you send or respond to. It’s free and it let’s your friends, family and anyone you are in touch with via email know that you have a business on-line.

8. Keep a Good Blog. While more and more businesses are starting blogs, few of them are doing it right. If you’re using your blog to publish product announcements in corporate-speak, it’s useless. You need to remember a simple mantra, ‘views not news’ – make sure your blog has something interesting to say. Don’t just use your blog for advertising your new products, sales and what not, give your readers more. You could put up a joke a day, quote for the day and so forth, even recipes would be great to add to keep them coming back.

9. Buy Search Engine Ads. Many people seem to think it’s some kind of admission of defeat, but search engine advertising can work very well, especially with keywords that aren’t already cluttered with ads. If you do it right, you can get very targeted ads very cheap – indeed, ironically, the more targeted the ads, the cheaper they tend to be.

10. Start an Affiliate Program. Finally, if you’re selling something, don’t forget that old standby of web marketing: the affiliate program. Offer visitors a cut of the profits if they can sell your products for you, and all of a sudden you’ve got a crack sales team raring to go. The only trouble with this plan is that everyone is doing it, so you’ll need to offer a high percentage of your profits to your affiliates to make the offer attractive to them. Even if your affiliate members do not generate a lot of sales, you have backlinks to your website that you didn’t have to pay for and that helps with your search engine ranking and of course link popularity, plus it’s free advertising!

An innovative technology that is bigger than radio, television, newspapers and all other forms of advertising combined! Big Business Advertising with Audio + Getting paid for each and every site visitor = Revolutinized money making opportunity!!!

66,000 advertisers have jumped on board and are ready to pay you for every visitor you get to you your website.

There is no hype here, it is true, finally you can monetize 100% of your web traffic without anyone having to click anything, complete any forms or buy anything. Affiliate programs requires action from your visitor to get paid, this won’t require them to do anything but visit your site!

Recently I came across a new innovation that you need to hear about because it may affect the way you earn with your website in the very near future. This site is in beta.

As you may know, major television networks are in trouble because their advertising revenue is dropping. They are losing market share at a dramatic pace. The cost to purchase air time is tremendously high. Internet advertising is a lot cheaper and the expanse of reach is much wider – the world!!!

For the first time in history, website owners are provided the ability to share in the ad revenue that was formerly spent with the giant TV networks. A work at home business with big companies advertising on your site! Wow!

Advertisers like Harley Davidson, HBO & Taco Bell are willing to pay site owners on 100% of website traffic to make up for the loss of viewers that the big TV networks are experiencing.

Do your online business a huge favor. Check out this F*R*E*E opportunity that is taking the advertising community by storm.

This is bigger than radio, television and all other forms of media combined! The best part, you get paid for every site visitor!

I’ve been online for over a decade and this has got to be the best program I’ve seen. Getting paid for every site visitor without requiring your visitor to click or buy anything. Can you imagine?

Technology has sure come a long, long way. Want in on the ground floor you should check it out.

Site is due to launch in February 2008.

Searching the web a few nights ago, I actually found a site that allows you to do just that . . . create your own Social Networking Community. The site has been online since 2007, currently it boast 7,591 pages containing 20 communities. That’s a lot of free social networking communities I’ve never seen before. I love the fact that it is FREE!

Ning.com a rather unusual name, but this site provides anyone the ability to create your very own community. No html knowledge required.

It provides you with a subdomain set up with http://yourcommunity.ning.com a search engine friendly url.

Choose from various templates or customize it to fit your own needs. The customization process is pretty simple. You can add widgets and your members can create their own blog as well as give each the ability to customize it to their liking, invite friends, etc . .

A forum can also be added and there are other third party widgets that can be installed, such as embedding YouTube videos and a few others.

Why create your own community or network? Why not? Another place to advertise, another place if used wisely that will provide you a backlink or just another place to hang out.

Can you monetize the site? Yes, most definitely. You can add several text box widgets which allows you to insert HTML codes, meaning you can charge for advertisement, create Adsense Revenue or add your affiliate product to these text boxes.

Similar to MySpace you can add photos as well as music. You can also create groups! There are many other additions, that you can check out and use. The site is pretty user friendly with lots of features. You are provided the ability to create as many communities as you choose. A main admin control area is provide to allow you the ability to manage all of the networks you’ve created from one area. The navigation however, is not that great. Once you venture to managing one network, you need to either use your back button or enter the URL of the main admin URL. A little inconvenient, but otherwise bearable.

You can check out all the features this site provides by clicking here .

As with most free services they also offer “Premium Services”. The Premium Services include the option to run your own ads, hide your network’s source code, map you own domain name, or buy more storage and bandwidth for your Social Network. I don’t recommend upgrading as the prices are rather steep. To run your own adds, the charge is $19.95 per month; to use your own domain name there is a charge of $4.95 per month; to remove the created by ning.com link at the footer of the page this option is an additional $7.95 per month and to add additional quota, the cost is $9.95 per unite per month (1 unit = 10GB storage, 100GB of bandwidth).

Utilize the free portion of the site until you’ve used up all of your quota. Unfortunately, the site quota for free communities isn’t listed anywhere. However, the price to upgrade your quota is a lot cheaper on this site than most current social networks like Ryze ($10 per month with ability to create 1 Forum).

The internet is filled with sites the provide free services. Ning.com is just one such site providing you with the ability to create your very own Free Social Networking Community with your choice of features! Don’t you just love the internet??

For more FAQ & Help topics visit the External Link provided below.

Ning.com | Ning FAQ & Help Center

You can also choose to join one of my Social Networking Communities

WAH Network Community
Guild Of Crafters

Free Software.

Nowadays, it’s easily possible to build a website using nothing but software you can get for free – most of the best scripting languages are free, and each one has had a lot of free software built for it by hobbyists. Check out Source Forge and Free Ware Files
containing big repositories of free software.

You might think that free software would be less functional than paid-for software, but you’d be wrong. Plenty of free software is simply implementations of standard software, and it works perfectly well – if you want a forum, for example, there’s no clear advantage in paying massive license fees to vBulletin (the biggest seller of forum software) instead of just installing the free phpBB. The free software gives you more flexibility, and yet comes at no cost.

Free software has become an ideological movement, for people who want to be able to modify their own software, and much of the free software out there is quickly becoming widely-used and standard. Using free software doesn’t make you look cheap, because users are used to seeing it everywhere – even better, the chances are that they already know how to use it.

Templates.

Depending on what kind of website you’re running, you could use the design templates that come with your free software – they’re usually perfectly adequate. If you don’t want to do that, then a quick look around at a site like Template Monster is sure to turn up something suitable for your website that only costs a few dollars. Or you can find free templates by using the numerous Search Engines available and turn up an abundance of sites offering this type of service.

Pay as You Go Hosting.

Instead of asking you to pay monthly for hosting, more and more hosts are starting to offer ‘pay as you go’ hosting, which means that you only pay for what you use. This saves you a lot of money, because websites that are starting out rarely use all the features and bandwidth they’re paying their host to provide.

At nearlyfreespeech.net, for example, you add money to an account and then pay one dollar for each gigabyte of bandwidth you use. Most of these hosts allow you to start an account with very little money – the minimum is usually $5. If you keep your site light on graphics, that first $5 can last you a very long time.

Guerrilla Marketing.

Finally, one of the biggest costs associated with any website is marketing it – whether you’re planning to pay for banner ads or ads in search engines, marketing is a big cost. You can save money, though, by resorting to more ‘guerrilla’ techniques, such as becoming involved in online communities than you think might be interested in your website. The biggest free marketing technique out there is SEO (search engine optimisation), which is when you build your website in a way that makes it more attractive to search engines, getting you targeted visitors for free. Once you’ve designed your site for SEO you can submit it to DMOZ.org and other Search Engines. It will take time before you site is listed, but there are other ways to get your site noticed before hand.

Sign Up and Join Social Networking Communities, such as Ryze.com , AdlandPro.com , Ojeez.com , and Yuwie.com , MySpace.com , just to name a few. Joining and being active within your chosen Social Networking Community can help get your site noticed.

Creating a web presense doesn’t have to cost as much as you think. Using the information provided should help to get you well on your way to your first website creation!

However, the only reason why I would recommend the use of web templates is if you have the ability to customize it to fit your own needs. Most also come with custom CSS and are web compliant.

Web Templates should always come with PSD files, that will allow you to change the images.

What is a PSD file? A PSD file is layered easy to modify image file. It contains all image sources for your web design template, usually created with Adobe Photoshop. However, this file format is compatible with most graphics program.

There are many sites that offer Web Templates for sale. Unfortunately, they never retire any templates after they’ve been purchased by say, a hundred websites. There are sites that offer free templates, you just need to leave the link to their site on the template to use it.

If you plan to create a site using a web template, here are some guidelines to help you avoid mistakes when using ready to use web templates.

The first obvious mistake you should be aware of is using a template that is very popular. When you create your site you want it to be unique to show your individuality. Hence the need to purchase web tempates that have editable PSD image files. Look for a web template that is easy to navigate and has the layout that you want for your site.

If you purchase this type of template, it is already saving you time, which is the whole point when using a ready made web template.

The template shouldn’t consist of too many images, as this will take time to change. A simple web template with header, background, nice color scheme and layout is all that you really need.

Don’t choose templates because they are pretty. If this is a business site, you want it to look like a business. On the other hand, you can soften the look to match your style i.e changing the color scheme, just don’t make it too pretty.

Don’t overly change the web template beyond recognition. Most websites have the same basic layout anyway, header, two or three columns with the navigation on the right or on the left or sometimes at the top of the header or in the header itself and a footer. All you’ll need to do is customize it to fit your needs.

Don’t assume that the web template comes complete with your meta tags. You need to insert the proper meta tags, title, and meta description yourself.

Once you’ve chosen your web template, install it to your website and start your customization.

You’ll use the same images and even the same names. Just make sure you keep a complete copy of the PSD image files separate from the ones you are customizing just in case you inadvertently make a mistake and flatten the PSD files.

Change the images found in the layers of your PSD files to suit your needs as well as the text. Save the image in the same folder and with the same name that it was provided.

Once you’ve completed all your image customizations, upload them to your site. Refresh your page and you’ll see that you have just customised the template with your own design.

If you don’t like the color scheme of your template, you will be able to change them within your custom CSS text file. If you’re not too sure what you’re changing, play around with it. All colors are in hex codes. Make sure to keep a copy of the original CSS file. Do not overwrite your customization on the existing file. If you make a mistake you can always upload the original file and start all over.

Using ready made web templates can save you a lot of time and effort and you don’t even have to know too much about designing a site because it’s already done for you. Customizing it to fit your needs is the only thing left that you’ll need to do.

Follow the simple tips provided and even if you use a web template that has been purchased and used by many, you will have created your own identity online for the fraction of the cost of a web designer.

Avoid using too many images on your website. Search Engine robots cannot read image files so it is best to use Text when creating Internal and External links. Avoid using frames if at all possible. Search Engine robots are confused by them. A page within a page. PHP or SSI includes is your best solution if you really need to create a Frame like page.

You maybe tempted to add Flash Movies and Animated Images on your site. If you have to, use as sparingly as possible. Avoid inserting them on your home page. Some of these have large files and may take your page longer to load because of it. Depending on your site visitors internet connection, this can be one of the reasons why they leave your site.

Make sure to utilize your HTML meta tags, site title and site description. Use the meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site. This will help the search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. Adding the proper information for every important landing page on your site in your site’s meta tag will make it easier for the Search Engines to catalog your site. Inserting the apporpriate robot tag will ensure that the robots come back on the specified intervals to respider your site again.

Avoid inserting too many javascripts or styles within your HTML Head tags. The scripting can confuse the search engine robots and it slows down the page load of your site. Instead learn and use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) they are more effective and efficient. The entire behaviour of your web page can be included within your custom CSS style sheet, including javascripts. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

Most importantly, your site text content should include your targeted keywords. This is often time one of the biggest blunders that new site owners make, creating their site with text that do not contain any of their keywords. The keywords inserted into the keyword meta tag should be sparodically seen and read by the search engine robots on the same page.

If you create your site for the search engines you will get your site listed!