Seeking to honor the Lord Jesus Christ in all our business dealings
 

Building a Web site is not easy to learn.  Once you learn how to do it, maintaining a Web site or adding additional pages to your site isn't too hard. You can kind of trace my progress at learning Web page design by looking at the 3 Web sites we have:

http://www.charactercomputing.com/prayer/ is the first Web site I designed
http://users.commspeed.net/ccc/ is the second and

http://www.charactercomputing.com is the most recent one.

I have also designed a site for a friend, http://www.interimpastorsearch.com/ 

You will see they got progressively better.

You will have a number of choices to consider: 

1. What Web page hosting service to use.  There are free ones out there (like Geocities, Netscape's Site Central, Juno, BizLand, Tripod, Angelfire, etc.).  The problem with most of them is that they put annoying (and sometimes immoral) advertising on your pages.  Netscape is the one exception, that's why we're using it for the one Website.  Sometimes your local ISP will offer you a free personal Website; that's what I use for my personal Website.  The other disadvantage of free Web sites is that you can't have your own domain name (www.whatevernameyouwant.com) with a free Web site.  If you don't want to have a free Web site, with all the difficulties that they can bring, may I recommend Emerging Markets Web Design?  This is the Web hosting service that I use.  It's run by a Christian man in Virginia.  He has given me a price cheaper than the price shown on his Web site: $10.95 per month for all the features except a shopping cart of his standard service (normally $19.95).  

2. That brings me to your second decision: whether or not you want your own domain name.  You actually "rent" domain names, you can't permanently buy them.  There are a number of places on the internet to register a domain name.  Many charge about $25 a year, but you can get it for about $9 a year from www.godaddy.com.  However, if you sign up with EMWD, he'll give you a free year's rental of your domain name. 

3. Now the real challenge begins.  Your third choice is what software to use to design your Web site.  For basic sites (like my first two sites) you can use free programs available on the net.  I used Netscape Composer and Microsoft Front Page Express to make my first two Web pages.  My third site was designed with Microsoft Front Page 2000, which is very nice but expensive.  Whatever site you use, it is a good idea to have some knowledge of HTML.  Check out www.wdvl.com for all you'll ever need to know (and a whole lot more) about HTML programming.  They have stuff for beginners on there. Oh, if you don't want to design your Web page yourself, you can hire someone to do it.  The man at EMWD does Web page design.

4. This isn't really a choice so much as something to do.  Once your Web site is all done, you will probably want to submit it to search engines and indexes.  This is an unbelievably complicated science among some computer gurus.  Go to www.selfpromotion.com for the best how-to and help in submitting Web sites that I have found.

5. If you will be selling something, you will want to be able to collect payment over the Internet.  A merchant account with a shopping cart can run upwards of $100 a month.  If your sales won't justify paying that much, I recommend you sign up for one of PayPal's business accounts.  They charge you 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction, and there are no monthly fees.  They have a shopping cart feature too, but I like the one from www.emartcart.com better, because it allows you to collect sales tax.  Sign up for their $10 a year "Premium Service"--it's worth it.  (The EMartCart deal is so good, it actually makes me suspicious.)

Still got questions?  Please email me!

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