Establish Your Presence On The Web
Just having an email address on your visiting card is not enough… you must have your own personal web address too…to prove that you are a computer literate tech savvy person and the one who updates himself according to the latest trends.
And the good news is that setting up your own personal website is no more a geek task and you don’t even have to spend a penny. In this article I’ll guide you through the steps to establish your web presence easily and completely FREE!
Why do you need a personal home page?
Setting up your objectives will help you to decide the content of your home page. For example, you can create a website to provide information about your business, to post your resume, to host your online photo gallery or just to tell the world about your hobbies., possibilities are endless.
So scratch your head n pen down your priorities.
Programmers….stay away!
Believe me, you don’t need to have any programming skills to create a web page. But being familiar with some geek words does help.
HTML is a language which is used to design web pages. You can make them more dynamic & interactive with the help of scripting languages such as Java script, VB script or ASP.
MS Access or MS SQL can be used as a backend databases to store the information.
Don’t be afraid. you don’t need to know anything about these, just remember the words to throw them on to the person who’ll ask you about your site:-)
Tools people use.
If you don’t know anything about the programming then go for Microsoft Frontpage which comes bundelled with your favorite MS Office. It is WYSIWYG(What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor. Use their wizards to create a website & apply themes from really nice collection.
If you want to code by yourself, nothing beats Macromedia Dreamweaver. I strongly recommend this tool to create websites. It provides you with the functionality to test your webpage across other browsers. You’ll be bowled over by the features of this software.
You may use free tools like ACE HTML editor and 1st page HTML editor.Find them in any of the magazine CDs.
Selecting the service provider.
We are ready with our tools n goals, now lets start hunting for the good service provider. Geocities.com is the most popular web hosting service on the net. Creating a site is a cakewalk with the help of page wizards. Just sign up for free and launch Page wizards. This wizard will ask you some questions about your interests, hobbies, contact information, etc and generate a web site for you. You can even upload your photo on this site. You even get an option to choose a template or theme for your website from their collection. Geocities.com will put a Ad banner on each page of your site.
You can get rid of this Ad banner if you choose Brinkster.com’s hosting service. But here you don’t get anything like page wizards, you’ll have to build your pages manually(using any HTML editor) and will have to upload on the site. I’ve not found better host yet which gives nice facilities absolutely FREE without any banner ad.
Adding some spice to the WebPages.
If you want your friends to come up again & again to check your site then you must be dynamic. Update the content as regularly as possible. Add some interactivity to your website with these tools:
Guestbooks: Add a guestbook to your site to keep track of the visitors.
Counters: Page counter help you to measure popularity of your web page.
News Feeds: These feeds get updated dynamically so you just have to insert them & forget.
Message Boards: This is a great way to form a community of like minded.
Short Address:This service provides you with a short address & redirect the user to main address.
Get these tools from: FreestuffFactory.com, Everyone.net, ThefreeCountry.com, Cjb.net, Lookscool.com & Geocities.com
Tell the world that you have arrived!
All said & done, now market your site aggressively. Mail your new webaddress to all the friends in your address book, Submit your site to search engines using SubmitExpress.com, Put a sticker on your bike, join webrings at Webring.com or just tell anyone who will meet you today.
Refer to my site: https://askharshal.cjb.net for more details.
(This is also a marketing technique!)
Happy Surfing!