I think that's a great idea. Let me give you a few tips and tricks that I have learnt, that may help you. I only wish I had had this information before I started it would have saved a lot of extra grey hairs and my poor healing crystals would not be so overworked.
I am going to write this article the way I would have liked articles to have been written when I started out. Most use abbreviations that I had no idea what their meaning was.
So I will try to give a plainer explanation here. I am not trying to insult anyone's intelligence here; I just know how things felt to me.
Firstly if you are new to websites and do not know where to begin, well here's as good a place as any. I am sure that someone has said that you will need a Domain Name.
Now if you do not already have a Domain Name, here are some things you should know.
Your first instinct is probably to get your Domain Name the same as your business name.
Now this if fine if for instance, your site is about picture framing, and your business name is for example "Jones Picture Framing". But if your business name is say, "Picture Perfect" or "Beautiful Frames" then you may have to think about another Domain Name as it is one of the factors that Search Engines or SE as it is usually written use to rank your site.
Site rankings are very important to bring visitors to your site Keywords (more later) are what is important when choosing a Domain Name. I will explain what I mean by this using my own experiences when setting up my website.
My business name is "Crystal Vibrations" not being very net savvy, I found a Domain Name Register and looked up "crystalvibrations" Domain Names to see what was available. Well crystalvibrations .com and crystalvibrations.net were already taken, but
Crystalvibrations.org was available. I grabbed it with both hands, I could have gotten crystalvibrations.com.au (au being the extension for Australia) but I did not want that as anyone typing in the name and forgetting the au extension would have gone to another site completely. So www.crystalvibrations.org was born. (This is what is known as your URL.I hope your head is not spinning to fast I remember the first time I was asked to enter a URL I though what on earth is that.) I was very proud of myself, now having my own Domain Name. I thought that was not to hard, surely doing a web site was going to be easy.
I am sure you know that when you look for something on the net, you type in words related to what you are looking for e.g. "crystals" "picture framing" "internet marketing".
All done this a few hundred times right. Well these are known as Keywords.
See where I am going? Sure, my Domain Name has Crystals in it but, try typing crystals into a search engine like Google and see what you get. Anything from watch crystals, snow crystals, crystal glassware and also crystal gemstones. There are literally hundreds of thousands of sites with crystal in there Keywords. My poor little site was going to get lost. As a visitor to my site, you know I am about Crystal Healing, and yes, crystals do vibrate as part of the healing process, but not many people type in crystal vibrations when looking for crystal healing information. Wish I had known this at first. (Never mind there are ways around this little setback. If you like, me already have a Domain Name.)
For me a Domain Name like "crystalhealingvibrations.com" would have been more suitable.
Have I put you off doing a website? I hope not, this is not my intention at all; I just want to save you the late night hair pulling sessions I went through. I have found some great tools to help overcome the problems I encountered. I will tell you about them at the end of this article.
Next: let's assume you have a great Domain Name with the Keywords you need, you will need what is called a Web hosting Service, they are all over the place, you will need to check them out carefully. Again in my glorious ignorance I, though right we have a local provider here in town, keep the money local and provide local jobs. Great sentiments, worked well for the first couple of months. My hosting providers are very nice people, always friendly and smiling nothing is too much trouble. Aha! However, I found that as my site grew I needed things like auto responders (It's O.K. one of the tools that I found will explain these), extra email addresses, shopping carts (to sell my books), access to download my e-books and the like. No Can Do said my provider; you will need software to run from your own computer. Help!! where to start, good old search engines to the rescue. Found that getting all the programs to do what I need is going to get very expensive and these were nowhere near top of the range. Believe me I was starting to feel snowed under. (Solution for me later)
I had gotten help from other people about writing my website and lucky for me my daughter's partner who had taught website design to college students was a handy reference guide and fixer upper to call on. Not everyone has this resource available to them. (Hey, have to have a break sometime). You have a few options around this hiccup, you can hire a website designer, they can get a bit expensive sometimes. It is really a good idea to try and do it yourself, as you know the feel you want you site to have.
There are software programs called "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG), these are just like using a word process and make website designing very easy. (See told you no need to panic).
Me being stubborn and a control freak, I had to do everything myself, just to make sure it was done just right.
Now this is where the universe decided to come to my rescue, though I had suffered enough. I had exchanged links with a number of other sites (you will learn about links and how to set them up if you use one of the tools at the bottom of this article). One of these sites webmaster (the one who maintains the site. Not trying to be patronizing here, but I thought it was the site owner, and in most cases it is, but it can also be an outside person who handles the day-to-day running of the site). Mistook my intentions when I ask him to check out, the link to his site on my website. Lucky for me he thought I had asked him to evaluate my site. He very kindly did so saying that it was not something he normally made a habit of. Well this is when life really started getting better. He made some very handy suggestions on improving the look and feel of my site, but he also gave me a contact that would change my life for the better.
It was just to sign up for a subscription to a free copywriting newsletter. Red Hot Copy (info at end). The information gathered from this alone was great, but from the newsletter, I was recommended to visit a site on internet marketing. I checked the link more out of courtesy than anything else. Bingo here is what I had needed before I started. Jim Daniels is an internet marketer extraodionare.
He had done all the things I had done fallen into the same dark pits, dragged himself out, and made a very successful business. He had written a CD about getting started on the internet from go to whoa. Everything needed was there.
Here's the next time I felt the universe steering me. On this CD was info on web hosting sites. Just when I thought I was going to have to shell out thousands of dollars, I could not really afford at the moment, for all those software solutions. My knight in shinning armor came riding out of the computer screen (or across should I say).
One of the web hosting options on the CD provided me with everything I needed and some I had not even realized I needed. And get this all for only $6.00 more a month than I was paying already. Someone pinch me, I think I'm in love. Now I can crank up my site and take the world by storm. I have everything to make a success.
A word of warning it is still going to take some elbow grease and time on your part to get you really rocking along, but boy will it be worth it.
I hope I have not scared you from trying to do your own website, despite all the late night hair-pulling sessions; it has been a lot of fun along the way and also very rewarding. I have gained a whole lot of new skills, and mastered things I never thought I would.
Now I am going to plug the people who have made my life so much easier. This is a thank you to them from me and my very very overworked crystals.
Firstly Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero of RED HOT COPY fame is one of the Best copywriters World Wide. Visit her site and sign up for her free newsletter.
Lorrie's tips are great. I have applied many of them and really noticed the difference. If you are serious about giving your visitors a great time and quality site, you must do this for yourself.
Second Jim Daniels that angel from heaven with his EzWebBusiness Builder a step by step guide to getting your site up and running. From what to write about- getting your domain name- web hosting- those links I mentioned earlier-building your website with templates and other great stuff.
Visit Jim's site by clicking on the image below:
And last but by no means least Thirdsphere Web Hosting: These guys are just great. They have everything you could possible want in a hosting service, auto responders, email accounts, great site building tools, their statistics are to die for, now I know where my traffic comes from and how much I am truly getting. They even generate Meta tags for you, you give them the information and hey presto! There they are (Meta tags are what the search engines use to help them rank sites). Meta tags are a very important part of your website. I could go on and on about the great services and neat goodies they provided you with all for the one price (no extra add-ons). I have worked it out that by moving to Thirdsphere, I can be with them for twelve years, yes twelve years before I would have broken even if I had stayed with my old service provider and purchased all the software that I would have needed. (And that's only if everything worked well together). But don't take my word for it visit Thirdsphere and find out for yourself
Just click on the link below and be taken to a new world. I cannot leave without telling you about the people at the help desk, they are wonderful. I have asked a number of questions, some I am sure they must just shake their heads at. Like I said some computer terms had me stumped. They not only answer promptly, but make you feel like it's a perfectly normal question to answer. Thanks heaps help desk
No claims made: The proported powers are
gathered from vaious source, books, crystal lore, writing, discussion groups
©2005 Crystal Vibrations Ballarat
Australia
