Web Design for Everyone
Welcome to EZwebdesign.com. If your a seasoned web designer, your probably at the wrong site :) Though you may find a couple of useful tidbits of information. If you need some tips or looking to start your own site, please stay and take a look around.
Designing good, "clean" looking, easy to use website is not rocket science. Now I am in no way a web design guru. If you need a professional looking web site that only provides information about you or your business, you can do so easily and affordable by using sites like this one. There are lots of free resources available online and even buying templates is a decent low cost alternative to hiring a web design firm that will charge you hundreds, even thousands of dollars for a site. Take this site for example, does not look half bad. I found this site template at Open Source Web Design. Find great looking templates that are free as long as you leave a link back to the template designer. In my case I used a template designed by Six Shooter Media. You can see the link back in the footer as well.
The start up cost for a site are relatively low. Web hosting is very inexpensive. You can get quality hosting for under $10 per month. I have a client who has been Powweb for 4 years now and only once can I remember being down for just an hour or so.
PowWeb
Hosting- 5,000MB - Free Setup - 150 GB Transfer! -$7.77/month!
A domain name costs only $8.95 at GoDaddy.com
. Yahoo is running a special, Register
your domain at Yahoo! Only $2.99. Website
templates are generally under $50 or free if you take the route I did for
this site and of course no expense if designing yourself.
Great you designed a site, now who's going to find it?
Beyond site design you have other issues and more expenses to consider. Sure you built the site but how are you going to get visitors? (maybe create a page for link exchanges, and other SEO tips, point out googles guidelines.) You can't just throw up a website and think your goinge to get thousands of visitors. You need to practice some good SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Be careful not to over do it, you can do more harm than good. For example, exchanging links with some online directories could be bad as Google may consider it a "bad neighborhood." This might be a site being penalized for just being a link or banner farm and not adding much value to search results. Install the google toolbar or find out the page rank of a site you are echanging links with. The higher the PR the better. If the PR is 0 or a grey bar a link exchange with that site will do little for your rankings unless that site is getting a ton of traffic from other means.
You can try paying for traffic. Be careful because this can get expensive. Be precise with your keyword bids. General terms usually have a lower ROI. I had some limited success in my one experiment with Google Adwords. Most search engines have PPC programs. Google Adwords is probably the most popular.
List your yite with Yahoo! Sponsored Search and appear on the top of search
results of leading sites like Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista and CNN.com. Sign
up and get a $25 credit.
So you wanna sell stuff online
If your creating an ecommerce site. You will need to either need to have some good programming skills or use a out of box product or service. There are 1,000's of services to use. Your best bet is to be sure to use one that may already have capabilities to process credit card payments unless you already have a merchant account.
Get
everything you need to start you own Web store - FREE. ProStores - an
eBay Company
One Month Free Trial! ProStores - an eBay Company
One Site and so many browsers
Another issue to consider is designing a site that works with the popular browers like Internet Explorer and Firefox. When building a site, test it in at least 2 different browsers. You might design a nice looking site in IE but it might not look so good in Firefox. Especially if you use CSS.