I market myself with a budget, which means I’m always looking for ways to save money, to do more with less, and yet always look like a million bucks. It’s not easy, but it’s not that hard, either. I stumbled upon extremely easy-to-use software that can get a website up and running in an afternoon! Here’s how I did it.

Your New Website – The Prequel

Before you can put yourself on the web, you need two things: a domain name and a hosting package. Both are easy to get, very affordable, and available today. Once you’ve got your domain and hosting package, you’ll need to wait about two days for the domain to travel through various registration channels before you can publish to it, but that’s the only delay.

A domain name is your URL, which is the www.yourbusiness.com address people will surf to once you’ve published your site. There are literally millions of URLs already out there, and there is a chance the one you wanted is already taken. It’s best, then, to have a few backup names in mind when you go to register yours.

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A hosting package is the space on someone’s server that will hold your website. Servers are big super computers that maintain your website and enable traffic to find it. Hosting packages can vary from very basic services to extraordinary bells and whistles. Which package you choose should be driven by the needs for your website. If, as we’re doing in this exercise, you are simply creating a “web presence” site, you only need very basic services.

Registering your domain is easy and cheap. If you Google “cheap domain registration”, you’ll see that you can get a domain registered for as little as $2.85 per year…that’s cheap. Make sure you read all of the details of the transaction before you give out your credit card number: sometimes you’ll find a dirt cheap domain registration tied to a rather expensive hosting package.

Once you’ve registered your domain, go get your hosting package. The best combination of price and service I’ve found so far has been at GoDaddy.com. I paid just $3.89 per month for a year’s worth of full service hosting from Go Daddy. Their tech support is excellent, and they make it easy to get started.

Download the Software

I Googled “Free web design software”, and found the site freeserifsoftware.com. There you can download their WebPage Plus SE software for free. When you install it, the software requires you to register it, which is also for free. You are quickly emailed an unlocking key, and the software becomes operational.

There are some limitations to the free version, which you can of course overcome by purchasing the full version. You won’t need the disabled features in the software in the beginning, so you won’t need to purchase it yet. I eventually paid the ridiculously low price of just $39.95 and got the additional features. More on that later.

Open “er Up!

When you first open the program, it asks you to choose from several options: create a site from a template, open an existing file, start from scratch, etc.

Choose Create Site from a Template. Select the template Coffee Shop and click on Open. As soon as you”ve opened it, click on File Save As, and key in the name of your new site. Now the template belongs to you!

The Coffee Shop template is very professional looking, but, unless your web is to be about a coffee shop, doesn’t match your needs. That’s okay for the moment. Let’s look around:

On the right hand side of the template are three vertical boxes, each with a set of tabs across the top. The top and bottom boxes deal with formatting information on the page. The central box, however, deals with the organization of your site. Each of the buttons in that box represents a page in the site. Double click on any of them – you’ll see that the button you clicked on now has the “eye” symbol on it, and the page has changed in the main screen. That means you’ve selected that page in your site.

At the top of the screen is a menu bar. Select View/Master Page. Look at what happens! All of the text and most of the pictures disappear! The Master Page is the backdrop for your site: whatever shows up here will show up in exactly that location on every page in your site.

Right click on the coffee cup picture at the top of the page. You can move it around, you can delete it, you can change it. If you want to put your own picture in there, delete it and then select Insert/Picture …now your picture will show up on every page.

If you have successfully completed these simple tasks, you are ready to start designing your site!

Web Design 101

Me, I’m a writer (that’s how come I can use a sentence that simply says “me, I’m a writer”!) It took me a long time to figure out how to put together a website that showed both my written pieces and my interests. Eventually I got around to the idea of focusing the website on my primary interest, Christian drama.

You’ll find the process easier if you center your main page on your primary focus. Your secondary projects can go on pages further down inside your site.

Think of your home page as the lobby in your online building. Your lobby tells your visitors what you are about, and guides them to the information they are seeking. The style, the colors and fonts and pictures, tell your customers who you are. Here are some simple design rules:

Use no more than three fonts on your home page. Using more than three fonts is confusing for the reader and makes you appear amateurish.

Break up large areas of text with boxes, pictures, and call outs. You can put large articles on other pages in your website…this is your lobby, remember?

Colored backgrounds are passé. Simple white is your best friend.

Don’t use giant pictures. Even in today’s high speed world they can take a long time to load, which imposes on your visitor to wait for you. Bad manners in the real world should not be repeated in the digital world!

Here’s a secret to help you design your page: take a quick tour around the web, visiting the sites of people in your same business. Then visit the sites of the big guys, like General Motors and McDonald’s. They are at the very forefront of corporate web design. You can use the same ideas on your website.

Adding Text

Now, you know what your lobby should look like. You know what you want to say. You’re ready to go!

Double click on the Home button in the center box on the right. On the main screen is a little box that says “Coffee Club” on it. Right click on that, and select “Edit Theme Graphic”. Here you can change the words, the font, the font color, and even the background color. Make whatever changes you want, and click OK.

In the box below the graphic button you just modified is a large box filled with Latin characters. I don’t speak Latin, but I’m sure this box says something! Right click on this box, and choose “Edit Story”. Here is where you can type in your text.

At the top of this box, you’ll see Format on the menu bar. Selecting this allows you to change the fonts and colors of your text. It’s rather like Word, and rather easy! When you’ve typed in your stuff and got it looking like you’d like, click on the little green arrow on the toolbar. Congratulations! You created your first piece of your web site!

To add a new text box, look over there on the left of the screen. In Word we’d call it a text box. In Serif we call it an HTML Frame Tool. Click on the little box with “H” in the upper left corner. Now go over to your page in the center of the screen and click/scroll out the box where you’d like it to go. Right click on your new box, and select “Edit Story” again. Congratulations! You’ve done it again!

Adding Pictures

Three icons below the HTML Frame Tool button on the left side of the screen is a little tiny photograph. Click on that, and it will bring you a navigation pane to find your picture. Browse for the picture you want, click on Open, and the click/scroll the picture into your site. Things are looking good now!

Moving Elements

You can move your HTML Frames and pictures wherever you’d like. If you can’t move something, no matter how many times you click on it, the item is most likely on the Master Page, not the page you’re working on. Click on View/Master Page to move that item.

Working with Additional Pages

Now that you’ve doctored up your home page, it’s time to go after those other pages. Double clicking on any of those pages in the center right box will open that page in the central pane. You can edit the crackers out of them, if you’d like. If you right click over the button in the right center box, you’ll see that you can delete them, insert or add them, and change their properties.

When you add a page, you get a little fill-in form to set up the page. The important thing about this form is the page name…it shows Page8. Change the name there and then click on OK. You get a page with nothing on it other than the stuff from the Master Page. Talk about your blank canvas!

Page Names, SEO, and You

Pop Quiz: why are you making a web site? Answer: so people can visit you on the web. You want your visitor to type “Your Business” into Google and come up with www.yourbusiness.com . Google uses a variety of tools to find your site, but chief among them is the name of the actual files in your site.

If you right click on the About Us page button in the center right panel, and then click on Page Properties, you’ll see that the page name is About Us, but the actual file name is About.html. If you added a page, right click on the page properties for that page. The file name is Page8.html! There’s an option to change it right there, and you want to make the file name match the page name.

The only exception to matching the page name and file name is on your home page. That file has to be called index.html for your hosting package to find it. It’s critically important that you DON’T mess with the file name of your home page.

As long as were on the Page Properties box (if you’re not, right click over one of the page names and go down to Page Properties and click on that), you’ll see a series of tabs across the top of the box. Click on the Search tab. Here you’ll find a blank box waiting for you to key something in. What goes in this box are the things your visitor is going to type in to find your site. If you make widgets, or write about widgets, you’ll want to put the word “widgets” in the box. If your site is about dogs, you would put the words dogs, canines, puppies… as many dog-related search words as you can think of…into this box. When somebody types in canine puppies, you want the Google search engine to find those words on your page, so that your page comes up!

Hyperlinks

You can link the pages of your site together through the navigation bar on the Master Page. Go there, and right click the Navigation Bar (the one that lists each of your page names about ¼ of the way down the page). Here you can change how the Navigation Bar looks, and how it looks at your pages. Normally, the Navigation Bar should show the “Child” pages underneath your home page.

You can also link to your pages, to items like PDF or video files, even to outside web pages, using Hyperlinks.

Create an HTML Frame Tool and place it on your page. You can type anything you like in the Edit Story part…let’s call it Hyperlink Test. Once you’ve placed it, right click on it and then click on Hyperlink. A plethora of options pop up, but look at the various boxes…it’s really easy!

The easiest way to link to an online page is to open your browser and go to that page. At the top of the browser you’ll see the actual address you’re visiting. Highlight that and copy it to the Windows clipboard. In Serif, under Hyperlinks, select “An Internet Page”, and then paste the address into the “URL Address” beneath the Hyperlink Information title. The HTTP:// in the box will disappear when you paste your address in.

Let’s Get Published!

Okay. We’ve designed our Master Page, fixed up our Home Page, added, deleted, and renamed all of the other pages in our site. We’ve double checked each page for typos. We’ve made sure our hyperlinks are correct. We’re done with the design phase.

When you signed up for your hosting package, you were given access to a Control Panel for your domain. In your browser, visit that control panel now. You need the IP address of your domain, and you’ll find that on your control panel.

With your IP address in hand, back in Serif, click on File/Publish Web, and then select Publish to Web.

You will be asked to identify your FTP account. Click on the Accounts button, and then on Add.

In the Add screen, type in the name of your domain…you don’t need to add the www or the .com, just the name at this point. Type in the IP address you got from your control panel – it should be four groups of numbers, each separated by a “.” Key in your username and password (which you carefully documented when you signed up for your hosting package), and then the www.yourbusiness.com domain name of your website in the bottom box and click OK.

Select the Publish All Pages checkbox, and then click on OK. Congratulations! Assuming you keyed in your IP address, your username, and your password correctly, you’ve just published yourself on the web.

Next Steps

Next you have to get to work on Search Engine Optimization…SEO is critical to driving traffic to your site. Open Google in your browser, and then click on Business Tools. Click on Webmaster Tools, and you’ll see a really nice suite of tools, all free, designed to help you improve your SEO.

You may, at some point, decide to “monetize” your website by adding advertising to it. It’s very easy to do. Visit Google’s AdSense to get started. Once you get the hang of it, take a look at www.cj.com, the web site for Commission Junction. There are tons of opportunities to put ads on your site.

Placing ads on your site, however, requires that you have access to the HTML coding your site. That HTML coding is available on the in purchased version of Serif. At less than $40, it’s a no-brainer.

Good luck to you in your new venture. Once you’ve published your site, you’ll want to change it. The first publishing takes a few minutes…updates only take seconds.

Pat yourself on the back and order another latte: you created your presence on the web for less than $100, in just an afternoon! By using just a few simple tools, by shopping for inexpensive domain and hosting tools, and the free Serif software, you’ve established your business on the Internet!