Tip 3 – Create A Website

Now that you've done all your market research, purchased a domain and got a web hosting account. All you need now is a website! As always, in internet marketing you have 2 main choices. You can do it yourself or pay someone else to do it for you.

Which of these options you chose will depend on a number of things. Firstly, how big a project it is and how important it is that you have a professional looking site. Second, how much skill, if any, you have and how much time and money you are prepared to spend on it.

Doing it yourself, especially, for smaller simpler projects is not half as scary as it first seems. This is largely thanks to website templates which are available for any web authoring software. These can be taken almost literally "off the shelf" and adapted to your needs. You can get by with these without knowing any html coding.

Doing it yourself gives you the control and flexibility that you cannot get when using other people to do it for you. Most websites have a constant need to be updated and modified, even if it’s just little tweaks here and there. This is so much easier if you can do it yourself.

There are also times that when to get what you want on your website you need to insert pieces of code into the page, e.g. when applying analytics, tracking or adsense. With simple instructions it is fairly easy to pick up how to do this and to be able to do it yourself. Obviously keeping backups of all of the files in case you mess them up is important. I like the flexibility and control that having all of the files locally gives.

One other option to consider is a combination of the two approaches. This is getting a web designer to come up with a nice looking site, and then getting all of the files and maintaining the site yourself. This will also cost you less money, as paying for ongoing maintenance can get very costly.

The two main market leading packages in web authoring are Microsoft Frontpage and Adobe Dreamweaver. I personally use Dreamweaver and have found it to be stable, reliable and a pleasure to use. It is a very powerful and complex program but most functions are pretty intuitive and when they aren’t I have found the help files to be extremely useful. With time, patience and by starting using the templates you do get more comfortable with how html works and slowly begin to understand how to do more things with it.

Although, I do have to say that I find the intricacies of css and php are harder to get to grips with than html. Once again though, by using templates and taking it slowly you can get by even with these, whilst you try to find the time or a course to really master them. It need not stop you getting perfectly functional and adequate websites up and running.

Tip 4 coming up concentrates on product development.

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