AllWebSuccess - Your Own Website

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This 10-year veteran eBay millionaire will disclose to you the same behind-close-door secrets that have generated him over $8.7 million over the course of his eBay career.”

Your own domain.

Now it's time to talk about the next step to grow your home business. The best way to have complete control over content and give you the most opportunity to maximize your income streams is to have your own domain name and your own website.

You will have to pay for this but if you want to grow your business, this is the way to do it. There are places you can get free web pages but don't use them for your business for very long. They are OK for someone doing it as a hobby but if you are serious about making a successful home business then you must have your own domain name and your own website. You just don't have any credibility at all using free webspace. The providers of free web pages usually give you just that - a page. They also will put ad banners or other elements on your page that you cannot control.

Once you do have your own website, you have opened up new options for online income. When you have your own site you can advertise your programs and also other products with banners and links and you control the content and layout on your site. You can have multiple pages that work together in a cohesive design to promote your business.

The first step to your own website is a domain name. You know, www.yourdomainname.com and to get one is a lot easier than you think. When you actually go to register a name, you will find that someone may have already registered the name you want, so it's a good idea to come up with several relevant names and variations for each one beforehand. Then you can search each one and if it's not taken, it's yours. You don't have to have your site ready to register a domain name either. You can own a domain name without ever actually putting a website on it so anytime is fine. I have used Dotster in the past but the last one I did, I registered at GoDaddy. There are many places to register a domain and it doesn't mean you have to use them for hosting.

The next thing you will need to do is design and build your site. You can always hire a web design professional to make you a site but that may run into quite a budget depending on how extensive a site you want. If you are like me, you don't want to spend a bunch of money when you are first starting out so that means doing it yourself. It's not that hard to do actually, so give it a try. I know you can do it.

You can use any number of software programs to do most of the work for you but it will help greatly if you learn some basic HTML code. There are some sites on the web that offer free tutorials on the subject and I will show you some basic code on this site but I recommend picking up a book on basic HTML at your local bookstore or online. It's always nice to have a reference book handy when you need it.

Let's make a webpage

Ok, I'm going to get you started with some basic HTML coding. This will be nothing fancy but it will show you that it's not rocket science to make a simple webpage. You are going to make one in the next few minutes.

HTML stand for Hyper Text Markup Language. It's not exactly programming but it does tell a web browser to display characters in a certain way and as a webpage. HTML tags are put in between brackets and usually come in pairs with the first one being the start tag and the second one being the end tag.

First the basic HTML tags:

<html> - HTML start tag. This tag tells the browser that it's html language.
</html> - HTML end tag. Note the addition of the / in the tag.
<body> - Your page content will go between these tags.
</body> - Body end tag.
<p> - Paragraph start tag.
</p> - Paragraph end tag.
<blockquote> - Blockquote start tag. Displays text in an indented format.
</blockquote> - Blockquote end tag.
<h1> - Heading start tag. Displays text larger like "Let's make a webpage" above. Can be <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6>
</h1> - Heading end tag.
<br /> - Line break or carriage return. This tag is used alone without an end tag. Note that I closed the tag with the / since there is no end tag for this one. It will work without the slash <br> but future versions of HTML will require the slash so it's good to get in the habit of using it now.
<a href="website"> - Link start tag. Makes a live link to another page or website that can be clicked.
</a> - Link end tag.

With these few simple tags, we can make a basic webpage. Below is how the tags would appear as code.

<html>
<body>

<h1>This is heading 1</h1>
<h2>This is heading 2</h2>
<h3>This is heading 3</h3>

<p>This is your first paragraph. You can type anything you would like to display as text in between the paragraph tags and it will appear on your page</p>
<p>This is your second paragraph. Just to show you how multiple paragraphs will appear on your page. Basically, it's unformatted text that will be displayed in whatever the default font is in whatever browser that is used to display the page.</p>
<p>This is a paragraph that I'm going to use to show you how to force a line
break. Simply hitting the enter key will move your cursor down a line but it won't show up on your webpage unless you use an html tag to tell your browser to do it. So, if you want to force a line break simply enter <br />
and your text after the tag will be on the next line.
</p>

<blockquote>The blockquote tag is used as an alternate for the paragraph tag to display a paragraph in an indented format. It will display the paragraph indented on both sides and depending on your page layout, can look more aesthetically pleasing or let you differentiate text such as putting a quote from another source such as a news story with the blockquote while leaving the rest of the text in normal paragraph formatting. The can be used in multiples if you would like to indent further, just use the tag again but you will have to use multiple closing tags as well. </blockquote>

<p>Here is the same paragraph displayed using the tag twice.</p>

<blockquote><blockquote>The blockquote tag is used as an alternate for the paragraph tag to display a paragraph in an indented format. It will display the paragraph indented on both sides and depending on your page layout, can look more aesthetically pleasing or let you differentiate text such as putting a quote from another source such as a news story with the blockquote while leaving the rest of the text in normal paragraph formatting. The can be used in multiples if you would like to indent further, just use the tag again but you will have to use multiple closing tags as well. </blockquote></blockquote>

<p>Now I'm going to show you how to make a live link.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.allwebsuccess.com">This is a link</a></p>

<p>Notice that the web address in inserted after the equals sign in quotes within the brackets. The text you type after the start tag and before the end tag, in this case "This is a link" will be the live link (clickable) text. It can be anything you would like it to say, like "click here" or whatever. If you would like to display the actual web address as the live link, you can. It would look like this: <a href="http://www.allwebsuccess.com">http://www.allwebsuccess.com</a>
</p>

<p>
Now you have made your first webpage!
</p>

</body>
</html>

Now, highlight and copy the above text from <html> to </html> and paste it into notepad. Don't use Word or any sophisticated word processing software as they add in a bunch of formatting or other unwanted characters that will confuse your browser. Use Notepad or for you Mac users, SimpleText. I don't know if Macs come with a simple text editor anymore or not but there are many versions of simple text editors that you can download from the internet.

Once you have the code pasted into Notepad, click "file", "save as" and when the save window is open, make the filename "test.html" (without the quotes) and then change the save as type to "all files" and save it to wherever you would like to save it. If you don't change the filename to something with a .html extension and file type to all files, it will save it as a text file and it won't open in a browser.

Once you have done these steps, find the file and open it. It should open with your browser and display as a webpage.

How about that! You've made a webpage. It's just that easy. There is a lot more to it though if you want to format text and add rich content like images, videos, scripts, etc. but you can learn how to do that from many different books, online tutorials, etc.

Here are some sites that offer free HTML tutorials you can check out:

w3schools.com/

mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut

htmlgoodies.com

htmlhelp.com

While you can manually write code, most people will use software that makes webpage building much easier. Sometimes referred to as WYSIWYG editors (What You See Is What You Get) the user types the content in and the software does the coding. Some of the most popular examples include Microsoft FrontPage and DreamWeaver. This software can be expensive but well worth it if you intend on building a lot of pages or multiple sites. You can also find simpler, less expensive or even free software available for download. Try looking at cnet or tucows for html editors.

When you start, your site can consist of one page and you can add more later or you can start out with as many pages as you need. I recommend you keep your site fairly simple and don't put a lot of gadgets and widgets on it that aren't really functional. For example, I went to one site that had a little flying clock that followed the curser around anywhere it went on the page. Nifty little gadget at first and then it quickly got very annoying and it was totally unnecessary. That kind of thing just clutters your site and a lot of them will slow your sites load time down. You want to keep your pages clean and simple.

Once you have the site to your liking, you will need to upload it to a hosting company. Here's where you will have to do some shopping around. You want a good hosting company and there are many of them out there that are very reasonable in cost. The hosting company I used to use went out of business and a company called Go-Mama hosting took over their accounts. I've been happy with them so far so I have stuck with them for this site but I also have a site at GoDaddy. (and no, they are not related...)

The cost is minimal. You should be able to get a domain registered and a basic site hosted for a total annual cost under $100.

You will need a basic FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program to upload your website from your computer to the server at your hosting company. There are several good ones but I use Ipswitch WS_FTP LE which you can download from cnet or tucows. It used to be freeware but I think they charge for it now. If you use Firefox as your browser, they have a built in FTP module called FireFTP under tools in the menu. If it's not there in your version, you may have to update or download it as an addon but it's free.

Your hosting company can help you with the settings and technical issues that need to be set but once you do it once, you are all set unless you change hosting or domain registration companies.

Well, those are the basics, so get building!

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Let's make a webpage