Chapter 19 Web Site Building

Chapter 19, Web Site Building...

"Every Online Step.com Training Course"

Learning and understanding web site building is hugely important. Here is the good news... It can be tedious at times, but it is not quite as hard as you might think.

Just so you know, I intend on this chapter being a somewhat general overview of the importance of web site building, and the basic steps to getting the job done.

There is no way that in one chapter I could cover every aspect to design and implementation. However, in the paragraphs to follow I will be giving you every explanation that one would need to get a site up and running for the first time.

Have you ever seen those email offers for free web site templates or even pretty inexpensive ones to buy? If you have not, then you just haven't been in the industry long enough yet, you will. Any way, a lot of these offers are actually pretty good, and you should start to keep an eye out for them.

Armed with one of these templates if you will, really nothing more than a blank canvas, telling you right where to fill in the blank, you can build something really cool. You will need a couple of free tools to get the job done, and a little patience, but it will definitely be well worth it.

After all, if you want to become an expert at Internet marketing, would it not make sense to at least have a fair understanding of how web sites work? Even better yet, how to build your own. What you need to do is to say to yourself this. Self, I will be able to throw up a one or two or three page site in like 40 minutes, with a cup of coffee or two. Tell yourself that, because it is true.

We have all been brainwashed in a way to believe that this web site building stuff is only for the experts, and we should never even consider trying it on our own. All the silly acronyms and fancy computer nurd jargon doesn't help either.

Hey, I built this entire program myself! Every web page, every graphic, everything. Now, this was far from my first, but never the less it is more than doable.

Number one, search for some free web site templates. Just Google it you know... Try to find ones that are niche specific if you know what I mean. If you are wanting to do a site to promote your new ebook on search engine optimization, then it might make sense to grab a template that has some images (pictures) with it that are relevant to computers or money or something like that. You can always put whatever images you want in or out so it's not that important, just helpful in some cases.

You will need two web building tools. Both of the ones that I use, actually that I am using right now, are completely free, no strings attached.

The first is what's know as an editor. I use NVU, and you can down load a free copy by clicking here.

The second tool you will need is a file uploader. This is used for uploading any pictures, or videos or that kind of stuff to you web site. Some editors have a built in file uploader, however NVU does not. Since I learned with NVU, I had no plans on re-learning some other editor just for the convenience of a built in file uploader.

I use another great free recourse called FileZilla. You can grab your free copy of this by clicking here.

So now you have a couple more programs sitting on your hard drive, just what you need right? What do I do now?!

You need one more thing to make this work and that is a domain name with hosting to build your site on. If you have one already, just contact your provider and tell them you need to add basic hosting to the domain name. Probably cost you around $5 bucks a month.

If you do not have a domain yet like a .com address or .net, then you can search for one by clicking here.

Yes I re-sell domain names and hosting. Hey I build a lot of web sites...

Again try to stay with your niche theme when choosing your domain name address. Remember, search engine optimization ebook sales site in our little example here? So in this case I would want something like seotargetmarket.com or searchfinders.com or something along those lines.

Once you have a domain name registered, with hosting, you only need to create what's called an FTP login. That stand for File Transfer Protocall. Remember what I said about the dorky names for stuff. This will be the username and password you will need to get on to the server that is hosting your site to make changes to it with your NVU editor and to upload any images or files with your FileZilla file uploader.

All that is left to do is to open up your NVU editor and login to your new domain name through ftp (your username and password) Once you are in, you will simply find that template on your computer that you hopefully grabbed earlier, and open it up through the NVU program.

When the template is opened inside your editor, you can make any changes to it that you want. Type in your text, your ad copy, whatever. This type of editor is known as a WYSIWYG (pronounced wisywig) editor. That stands for what you see is what you get. So, remember, whatever you see as far as changes inside the editor, is what you see on the actually web site after publishing.

If the template came with images, which most due, you will need to upload all of them with your file uploader.

Open up FileZilla, and login through ftp with the same login you used for NVU. Once your in, you will see your computer files on the left, and the web files on the right. Navigate through the files on the left to find the images folder for the template, and simply drag them over to the right side and release. I like to do this one image at a time.

After all your images are uploaded to the server, and you have made textual changes to the template through your editor, including fonts, colors, whatever, you are ready to publish!

Click the Publish tab at the top of the NVU tool bar (Blue earth with green arrow) You will always want to name your home page or the first page on your site index.html so when it brings up the box with file name in it, be sure to change it to index.html

The index page is where you are taken when you type in the site address, seotargetmarket.com... Any additional pages can be named whatever you like but they must always be names in lowercase only, with no spaces, and finished with the .html which tells the server it's a web page.

Click publish and then run to a new browser to type in your new web site address and see how it looks. I find it to be like a rule of thumb to keep the actual site up in one browser, while making any changes to that site in my editor. This way I can publish a change, toggle over quick to see how it looks and then possibly re-think my changes.

So that's about as general as it gets I know, but like I said, there is not a whole lot more to it. Yea sure there are always extra things like audio and video, and high end graphics and stuff like that, but you gotta start somewhere right? Like most of this Internet stuff, you want to always be learning, and there really is no end to the possibilities. I think that's part of what has always interested me the most.

Continue To Chapter 20, Now Go and Do It!

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