Build a website in 5 Days

Almost every IM method requires a website, so, you'd better have one. You don't need a very professional website which looks like amazon or facebook but you need something something small which doesn't take much time to load. Some people use Wordpress as a website but sometimes Wordpress just doesn't do the trick. Sometimes I come across people who pay 1000 bucks to companies to create their website. In my opinion this is stupid because this 1000 bucks could have been spent on SEO and website promotion. So, let me show you how to create a simple landing page in 5 day or less(depends on you).

First of all you will need some knowledge of HTML. You can get tutorials here or you can download the free e-book here. Both are very good so, you decide. I suggest you use Notepad++ to write HTML. If you simple don't want to learn HTML, you need to get a WYSIWYG web editor. You can pay for one but some are free. Dreamweaver is a very good one but is costly and very difficult to use. WYSIWYGwebBuilder is the simplest one I have ever seen and you will never need HTML knowledge but if doesn't support editing of web pages, that is, once a webpage is published, you won't be able to edit it again with this. You can download Seamonkey for free and use it whenever you need to edit webpages.

Now that you have learnt HTML, you need a host for your webpages. Visit http://www.tophosts.com to compare webhosting providers. You can also get free hosting at DotEasy but it may be slow. Any host with 10GB of storage space, 500GB of data transfer, CGI support and fast connection speed will do. If you are going to create a website and you will need to process online payments yourself, then you will also need a host with a secure server.

Make a plan of your website. List your objectives, competitors, materials you already own. Now take a good look at your targeted market. Make sure you know what they want. Next, choose a color scheme that will fit the type of website you are creating. Create a sitemap to build customer confidence. This may include about us page, contact us, location, FAQ and so on.

Create a new folder for your website on your computer and get started with designing.

You might need background images and logos for your website. You can create your own graphics with GIMP or Photoshop. You can find tutorials on photoshop or GIMP and you can also find free webbased tools to create your graphics, just google. Flamingtext is a free onlin logo creator which you can try. You don't want your images to be too large in size or they may take forever to load. Try to keep them as small as possible in size.

Now start designing your website. Make sure you include page Title, keywords, and description. Try KeywordTool to find good keywords. Insert your logo at the top of the webpage, make sure it matches the background color or the website will seem too dull. Create a navigation bar at the top under your logo or at the side of the body. Your navigation bar can be like this is: Home|Products|About US|Contact US|ORDER| . Include links where needed. A contact page is very important if visitors have questions, the best way is toi create a form and put in on the contact us page. If you simply put your email address, people may try to send you some spam, so, it's unsafe.

To publish the webpage, you need to use FTP or Webdisk. FileZilla is a good FTP client to start with. You have to name your main page as index.html and upload it on your server. You can find video tutorials on youtube.

Take a look at your website before spreading to the word. Point your browser to your domain name and see if you find any errors. If you find errors, go back and edit.