My intention is to help you own a profitable Internet Home Business.

Here is Internet Home Business course that will help and guide you to start off your Home Business on the Internet.

Lesson #17

STARTING YOUR FIRST WEB PROJECT, PART 2

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

You will learn by example in this lesson the issues involved in preparing materials for a Website, finding a design and hosting company, and registering your domain name.

PLANNING, DETAILS AND EFFORT ARE IMPORTANT

Since we last visited our hypothetical friend, Donna, she has been busy collecting and typing up her family recipes. For some of her recipes, she has begun preparing the dishes and taking pictures of the process with her digital camera. Going a step further, she has used the video camera (which she purchased to take family pictures a few years back) to video the major steps in preparing some of the dishes. She has decided to start talking to some Web design and hosting companies while she finishes up this process.

FIND A DESIGN AND HOSTING COMPANY WITH WHICH YOU ARE COMFORTABLE

After browsing on the Web and calling around to a variety of companies both large and small, Donna has received a wide range of quotes for both design and hosting of her site. Her estimates for design have ranged from $800 to several thousand dollars. Hosting quotes ranged from free to more than $80 a month. She has decided that free hosting will not be effective because visitors will be distracted from her site with the popup ads that come with most free hosting services. Plus, she just doesn't feel that a free site will have the serious and professional feel that she wants her site to have. However, she has found one small design and hosting company that she likes and with which she feels comfortable. They have quoted her $1,500 for the design (including the video processing) and $35 a month for hosting the site. She has viewed several samples of their work and it is all very professional.

While she is comfortable with the hosting fee, Donna has decided that she really does not want to invest the $1,500 design fee at this time. Working only part-time, she would rather take a shot at learning a little HTML and designing her own site to begin with. Perhaps later, if the site is successful, it would be worth the investment for the professional design. She realizes, though, that she will need some professional help streaming her video from the site. She contacts the company again and they give her a quote of $400 to edit and convert the videos she will make. Donna decides this is a good compromise and sets out to learn some basic HTML.

THE DO-IT-YOURSELF OPTION

Donna goes to the SFI Discussion Board and notices the link at the bottom of the page to the DBoard Resource Center. Going there, she finds some links to basic HTML tutorials and training on the Web. Being an IAHBE subscriber, she finds even better information at www.iahbe.org under IAHBE Web Resources. To round it out, she searches on the Yahoo! and Google search engines for "HTML help" and "HTML tutorials." Donna now has more than enough materials to learn how to design her own site. She sets herself a study schedule and allocates one hour every day for one month just to learning HTML and Web design. The rest of her time will be spent on preparing the dishes from her recipes and taking photos and videos of the steps involved in each.

REGISTERING A DOMAIN NAME

Having discussed her plans with the hosting company, Donna decides to go ahead and register a domain name. The hosting company will then set up an area on their server for her to upload her work as she designs her site. They will start to work on converting her video and preparing it for streaming from her site.

Donna goes to her gateway for GreatDomainia and finds the search box to explore what domain names are available. She first searches for "familyrecipes.com" and, as she expected, it is already taken. Luckily, her second search reveals a domain name that will be useful for her: "southernfamilyrecipes.com" is available, and being from the southern United States, she registers it right away.

There are, of course, other issues besides domain name availability that might come up regarding any name that someone wants to use for business. Someone else may have a copyright, trademark, tradename, or corporation registered in some state with this name. Just because the name is available for registration as a domain name on the Internet does not necessarily mean that no one has intellectual property rights established in that name. Donna makes a note to check with her lawyer as soon as financially feasible to make sure any such problems are dealt with before too much is invested in the name.

In the registration process, Donna is also given the option of registering "southernfamilyrecipes.net" and "southernfamilyrecipes.org". Knowing that most people associate ".com" with domain names, she decides to save the money required to register "southernfamilyrecipies.net" and "southernfamilyrecipies.org" for now and just register "southernfamilyrecipes.com." She also makes a note to herself to revisit these options, depending on her success with the site.

Even though Donna now has the domain name registration secured, after a discussion with her hosting firm she decides to request that they not enter it in their DNS servers just yet. Once her hosting firm assigns an IP number to her site, she can access it from the Web using that IP number for purposes of previewing the design work she has done and yet not risk the search engines finding her site too soon. She wants it to be ready before the search engines evaluate it.

As we conclude this visit with Donna, she plans to spend the next month making photos and videos of the preparation of her recipes and learning basic HTML. We will check back with her when she begins the actual design of her site.

CONCLUSION

Careful preparation and attention to detail are the keys to a professional Website. Even when you design your site yourself, it can be effective if you put great care into the preparation of the content. While preparing your content, shop around for a design and hosting firm with which you feel comfortable. Also, register your domain name early in the process. It is probably best at first just to register the ".com" domain to save money. Do not let your hosting company publish your site until it is complete. You want the first impression of your site by the search engines to be a good impression.

WHAT'S COMING NEXT

In our next lesson, we will revisit the important issues of keywords, key phrases, and integration of keywords and key phrases into site content. We will do this by following the example we have begun in the last two lessons.

by George Little
Copyright (year) Panhandle On-Line, Inc.
License granted to Carson Services, Inc. for distribution to SFI affiliates. No part of this work may be republished, redistributed, or sold without written permission of the author.

For more information on the Internet Income Course and other works and courses by George Little, see www.profitpropulsion.com.

For Web Hosting services specially designed for SFI affiliates, see www.profitpropulsion.com.

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