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Ok, so you have a brilliant idea for a new website, but a not so brilliant budget to get your project off the ground? We have all been there at some point and it can seem quite daunting once you start to really think about how to go about creating your own website.Here are a few tips to help you on your way. These are just a few things I have learnt from trial and error and so hopefully you will be able to get some useful information out of this, so you can avoid a lot of the brick walls I ran in to. CHOOSE YOUR NICHE CAREFULLY Ensure the market you would like to enter is not saturated. Carry out some product research to make sure there is profitable market for your selected product. It’s better to do the initial research first, rather than spend hours upon hours building your website and what not only to find out that no one is interested in what you are selling. REGISTERING YOUR DOMAIN NAME If you do a Google search on "domain name registration" you will find millions of search results with countless companies offering cheap domain name registration. The rule of thumb is you should never pay more than $15 to register a domain name these days, any more than that and you are being ripped off. If you can afford it, register both a .com and a .net domain for the same name. This will prevent traffic theft later on down the track if your website is a success. CHOOSING YOUR DOMAIN NAME Try to keep your domain name as short as possible. Do not use the minus symbol in your domain names where you can avoid it. Try to register a domain name that has your keywords in it, this will improve your search engine ranking considerably. Try to avoid domain suffix's such as .info .biz .org where you can. From my experience the general public tend to prefer a .com or .net website over a .info or .biz domain. Don’t use funky spelling, this is a common mistake, the more time you have to spend making sure people spell your domain name correctly is less time you have for marketing your product! Otherwise you can always use the Domain Suggestion Tool. Find Domains With Targeted Traffic Quickly. This will ensure your website gets off to a quick start as the domain name already has certain amount of traffic to it. CHOOSING A WEBSITE HOST Again as a rule of thumb never spend more than $15 a month on a web host. There are some sharks out there still charging $35 and upwards a month for hosting, this is a complete rip off. Try to choose a website host that is in your target audiences locality. You don’t have to be too picky about this, for example, if your target audience are Australians, use an Australian hosting company. This will increase your websites loading time for your target audience. The most important factor for me when choosing a hosting company is what tools their Control Panel has on offer. Try to get a host that has useful installers and a decent amount of SQL databases for you to use. This will save you a LOT of time when building your website. Having an inadequate cpanel can add hours to your development time, not to mention it’s as frustrating as hell. For beginners I recommend using GoDaddy.com for your domain name registering and hosting needs. They are quite affordable and reliable and their control panel facilities are top class. Click here for cheap Website Hosting only $4.95 per month WHAT WILL DRIVE YOUR WEBSITE? The first thing you need to decide is what is going to drive your website? What engine will you use? If you are a noobie you should probably stick to using either Joomla or Wordpress. These are easy to install and the learning curve is not a steep one, they also have a huge range of free mods and extensions you can use to jazz up your site. If you have a bit more experience HTML and PHP sites are better for SEO, but do not attempt to go down this path unless you have some experience in web design due to the steep learning curve involved. CHOOSING A WEBSITE TEMPLATE Ok so assuming you have chosen your design platform you are going to use, you now have the tedious task of finding the right website template to use. I found it always best to draw a diagram of how I want my homepage to look. This will give you a starting point when searching for a template. You can spend a fortune on "Premium" templates from various different sites if you have the money to waste, but I found it just as good to use free website templates instead. Free website templates are just as good as quality and design. The only price you need to pay for them is small link in the footer back to the designer or distributors webpage. Also, make sure you choose a template that has the correct number of columns you are after, e.g. there are a lot of brilliant looking 2 column templates out there but they are useless if your design requires 3 columns as it can be quite costly having to pay someone to add in another column.
Get Free Website Templates Here DRIVING TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE Ok so you have finished your site and are relatively happy with it to be released to the general public. The first thing you must do is submit your site to various different search engines. The easiest way to do this is to Google "submit website to search engines", you will get a heap of results and should be able to find a free submitter. Alternatively you can go to each search engines website and submit them manually using the links on their page. Tedious and time consuming though. Make sure you read up on how to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) your site, this will prove valuable in getting unique visitors to your site without having to buy traffic. By FAR the best ever decision I made for getting natural search engine traffic was investing in SEO Elite. This tool is brilliant for putting your traffic generation project on auto pilot and can save you a huge amount of time in the long run, bearing in mind that most of your time once the initial website development is completed is spent trying to drive traffic to your website. You can get SEO Elite by clicking here
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