Welcome to the getting started section of Virtually Ignorant. This section is designed as both a quick intro into all the main features offered on the site, and an area to pass on basic advice for those just getting their feet wet in web building. We have organized this page to mirror the overall structure of our site: each feature we describe is in the same position as it is on the navigation bar on the left.
Before getting started, we recommend setting up an email account specifically for web building purposes. This will allow you to keep all your web building information in one place, and keep your personal email account free from a lot of additional clutter. There are tons of free email services, such as Yahoo! and HotMail. Keep a box just for web building account information and such.
Create a Website
Web sites these days are primarily identified by the Domain Name they bear, and so this is where we begin. For those unfamiliar with the concept of a domain name, it is your site's address on the internet, just as the domain and address of this site is www.virtuallyignorant.com. Whenever possible, you should choose a name that is easy to remember, easily identifiable with your site, and easy to type. If your domain name contains too many characters, too many words, or unusual letter combinations that are neither words nor particularly memorable, you will most likely lose potential visitors as a result. Domain names can not be bought outright, but are rather registered for periods of time, usually two years. Once you have registered a name, for all practical purposes you own the name, and you will continue to do so until you either sell it or fail to renew the registration. Domain registration has gone nuts the last few years, and millions of site names have already been taken, including almost all one word domain names ending in .com and .net. Virtually Ignorant recommends a couple of discount domain registration services. A name means a lot on the web.
Now that we've dealt with the issue of your site's domain name, we can get down to the real nitty gritty, building the site itself. You have a couple of options when it comes to putting a website together, you can either use one of the WYSIWYG editors (it stands for What You See Is What You Get) or you can do the actual HTML coding yourself. WYSIWYG editors will allow you to create a page with virtually no previous computer experience, whereas if you choose to do the coding yourself, you will have to acquaint yourself with HTML, the computer language that web browsers read. Although it probably sounds like WYSIWYG is a great and far simpler alternative to using HTML, we strongly recommend learning the HTML code and designing the site yourself. Sites coded from scratch using HTML tend to be far more versatile and error free than those programmed with WYSIWYG editors, plus by writing your own code you will truly understand the inner workings of your website. We know that the prospect of entering your own computer code is intimidating to most of you just starting out, but we assure you that the basic code is remarkably easy and the fundamentals can be learned in a few short hours. To back up our claim, we have put a complete HTML Tutorial on our site that will teach you all the basic and advanced HTML techniques you'll need to build yourself a killer website.
While you're first learning the basics of HTML, we recommend writing your code in Notepad, a free program that comes with all Windows computers. Notepad is great for those just starting out because it contains absolutely no advanced features to make your coding easier! Since it is completely bare bones and makes you do all the hard work yourself, it really helps you learn your fundamentals well. However, once you move past the initial learning stage and start doing your actual coding, using Notepad can be a royal pain. At this stage, we recommend upgrading to an HTML Editor. These editors help you do your coding quickly and maintain the components of your site in an organized fashion, they don't actually do the work for you like the WYSIWYG editors. Some great HTML editors can be downloaded for free on the net, and even the ones you have to pay for tend to be relatively inexpensive.
Once you have your site coded, you will need to actually get it on the net. You'll need to use a File Transfer Protocol Program, FTP for short, to accomplish this. The FTP program is specially designed to send files from one computer to another. In this case, the web site you create will have to be sent from your computer to the computer where your site will be hosted (hosting options are discussed below).
We understand that not all our visitors are equally enthusiastic about the prospect of putting a web site together from scratch. Whether due to time constraints or an unwillingness to rest the future of their business site on their own site designing abilities, some of our visitors would like an alternative solution. For these individuals, we offer a variety of Professional Web Design options. Professional web designers can either build you a site from scratch or can take the site you built yourself and bring it to the next level.
Find a Host
In a nutshell, the web host is the provider of the computer space on which your web site is stored and is accessed by the viewer. Whenever someone types in your web address, they will be connected to the host's computer and access information there. Like anything else, the price you pay for a host will vary based on the quantity and quality of service you receive. Greater than 95% of the sites that you visit on the internet are probably hosted by Professional hosts. One can expect to pay anywhere from under $10 a month to several hundred dollars a month for professional web hosting. The amount of memory your site will occupy on the host's computer, the speed with which you want your visitors to be able to connect to your site, the amount of traffic you generate to your site will affect your choice of a host. Other features such as the ability to handle secure transactions and have unlimited email accounts on your site are all factors in the price you can expect to pay for professional web hosting. We offer a list of high quality web hosts for those with more advanced needs.
There are also a number of places where you can go to find free web hosting, but there are of course certain catches involved. Generally the deal that the free hosts offer is that they provide you with free space in return for putting advertising on your site. The advertising can either come in the form of a banner on the top of your screen, or an additional window that pops up whenever someone visits your page. Some of the free web hosts will allow you to use your own domain name, such as yourdomain.com, whereas others will require you to use a subdomain, such as yourname.theirname.com.
Accessorize
One of the most popular features to offer your visitors and one of the best ways to promote your site is to offer Free Email. With little or no financial outlay, you can offer unlimited user@yourdomain.com email accounts. The primary benefit of these accounts are that they keep your visitors coming back to your site day after day to check their mail. A secondary benefit is that every time one of your visitors sends an email, you get free advertising for your site in two separate ways. The return address of all emails sent will indicate that the mail originated at your site, and you can also put a tag line at the bottom of all emails sent by your visitors. The tag line is generally a quick one line plug for your site, such as "get free email at ProcrastinateNow.Com," that will appear as the very last line of all mail sent from your site.
Two other features that can keep visitors coming back to your site are Chat Rooms and Discussion Boards. Chat rooms allow for real time dialogue between people who happen to be visiting your site at the same time. Discussion boards also facilitate dialogue between visitors, but does not require them to be on the site at the same time. Rather, individual visitors will post a message to a particular board where subsequent visitors are able to read and respond to the original post. To get an idea of how discussion boards work, check out the web building discussion boards we offer on this site.
Those of you who spend a decent amount of time on the internet know that the fastest way to find something you're looking for is usually to conduct an internet search. We'll show you how to add a Search box directly onto your site, a feature that will keep your visitors on your site longer. Depending on which search option you choose to use, you may even get paid every time one of your visitors conducts a search.
There are currently innumerable sites on the internet. Finding a way to get your visitors to return regularly to your site instead of trying out competitor sites can be of the utmost importance. The most important aspect of this is, of course, to maintain a top quality site, and to hopefully blow away the competition with your content. Another way to create customer loyalty is to try to create a more personal relationship with your visitors. Sending out periodic newsletters to interested visitors and responding quickly and appropriately to any visitors that contact you are two ways of making your visitors feel a personal connection to your site. Our Email Lists, Autoresponders, and Help section can provide you with the tools you will need to start building these relationships efficiently.
When the internet first started out, information was king. These days, having killer content isn't necessarily enough to guarantee a successful site, your page has to look right as well. Fortunately, Images and other design tools such as fonts and animation are abundant on the web, and many of them are free. We have provided a list of some of the best places to get images, as well as some of the software you can use to create top quality images on your own. Also help yourself to our very own in-house produced free background images, free button images, free bullet images, and free horizontal line images.
A step more funky than putting images on your site is to put Audio on your site as well. Audio components can be programmed to start automatically when visitors arrive at your site, or to be turned on and off at their convenience. Many sites have started adding welcome messages that take the visitor through the features of the site, while other sites have used the audio component to provide background music.
Our Hard Core Jazz page can help those who want to add somewhat more sophisticated features to their sites. On this page we'll give you links to companies that can create custom designed programs for you that will function directly from your site or sell you one of their existing programs.
Even professionally made web sites can benefit from periodic Fine Tuning. Having errors in your site is the quickest way to convince your visitors that you don't know what you're doing. The links on your site should be checked periodically to make sure they're still active, and there is simply no excuse for having spelling or grammatical mistakes on your page. A number of internet services currently exist to help you work out these bugs, as well as performing other specialized tasks such as reducing the size of your image files to allow your page to download faster without sacrificing any quality.
Make Money
The easiest way to make money on the internet is through Affiliate Programs. Virtually any product that is currently being sold on the web can be sold on your site as well. Affiliate programs are a partnership between companies and individual web sites, whereby the web sites become portals for selling the company's products and in turn receive a commission on all sales they generate. By affiliating with some of the major on-line retailers, you are able to sell any products that they offer directly from your site. The retailer will do all the difficult work such as updating the inventory, setting the prices, and handling the credit card transactions. The only real work you'll have to do is generate traffic to your site, and you'll be able to collect commissions of 5% to 25% on all sales you generate. Some of the affiliate programs are even structured in such a way that the customer will never know that they are not buying directly from you.
Just about all sites these days sell advertising space in one form or another. The way web site advertising generally operates is that the advertiser will place a small banner advertisement on your site, and will pay you either by the click-through, the impression, the sale, or through some combination of the three. A click-through occurs when a visitor to your site clicks on the advertising banner and is taken to the advertiser's site. Some advertising programs are based upon click-throughs, and pay between $0.01 and $0.25 per click through depending on the advertising program and the amount of traffic you generate on your site. Some of the click-through programs will pay for impressions as well, though you will probably need about 10,000 unique visitors a month to even approach a company about paying for impressions. Every time an advertising banner appears on your screen, whether the visitor clicks on it or not, it is counted as one impression. You may only receive a fraction of a cent for each impression, but they tend to add up as they occur so often. The pay per sale advertising plans function much like the affiliate programs described above. When one of your visitors clicks on an advertising banner and ultimately purchases a product from the advertiser's site, you will receive either a predetermined commission or a set percent of the sale.
When most people think of earning money on the web, they probably don't think of either selling other people's products or generating advertising revenue, but of using the internet as a forum to sell their own products. Those who already have a product they are selling or wish to sell can start moving their products on the web quickly and easily. The key to being able to compete for market share in any retail venture you may operate on the internet is the ability to complete the sale on the spot, because if you don't someone else will. Virtually all sales on the web are completed using secure, on-line, credit card transactions. This is the preferred method of payment for both buyers and sellers as the process is entirely automated and can be completed in under two minutes. In order to conduct such transactions on your web site, you must first open a Merchant Account. The bank that holds your merchant account will then handle all aspects of the credit card transactions, including providing the technology to offer this service on your site. There are a number of other, less important accessories that will help a business web site function more smoothly, and these have been organized on our E-Commerce Accessories page.
If you are planning on using the internet to sell your own products on-line, there is no need to do all of the selling yourself. Just like the major on-line retailers have created affiliate programs to increase their sales, there is no reason that you can not do the same with your products. Since you only need to pay your affiliates when they generate sales, there is really very little disadvantage to pursuing this course. To create an affiliate network you must first determine how much money you can afford to give away on each sale. The more popular affiliate programs have thousands of web sites that are members and generate tremendous revenue. The more you are willing to pay your affiliates for each transaction, the more web sites you will be able to ultimately attract to your affiliate program.
Promote Your Site
The next step in the process is to introduce your site to the world. The cheapest and most convenient way to do so is to submit your site to the search engines. You can do this yourself for free using software designed specifically for the purpose, or you can join one of the many services on the web, including the one that we offer, that will do this professionally for you. Whichever path you choose, the most important thing is that your site is properly engineered to attract the attention of the search engines. See our brief META tags tutorial for an introduction into what the search engines are looking for and how you can best build these tags to get your site ranked higher in the search engine results.
We already discussed the possibility of creating Your Own Affiliate Program in the Making Money section, but we are returning to the idea here because it a great promotional tools as well. Creating an effective affiliate program will allow you to sell more products, and will also drive additional traffic to your site. Therefore, an affiliate program for one of your products, may greatly increase the sales of your other products as well.
A couple of other promotional tools that have started gaining popularity in recent years are link and banner exchanges. The concept behind them is quite simple, you put a link to someone else's site on your page, and they in turn do the same for yours. A number of companies have recently gotten into the act and built banner exchange networks whereby your banner can be displayed on thousands of pages in exchange for placing a single banner on your site. These deals usually aren't quite as lucrative as they are made to sound, but we'll give you the inside scoop on how they function and what benefits can be derived from them.
With more and more services on the net going for fees, you may find that buying targetted traffic with Pay Per Click Search Engines is the way to go if you're selling something on line.
Another cheap and easy way to get hits is to have your site listed in some of the Internet Directories that are starting to pop up all over the place. These directories function much like internet yellow pages, offering lists of web sites arranged by the services they offer. You'll have to weigh for yourself the benefits of joining some of the directories that charge for inclusion, but there is no reason not to have your site listed in the many free directories on the web.
To announce your site to the world in a single shot, there's still nothing that beats a Press Release (shy of a Super Bowl commercial). There are a number of agencies that specialize in handling press releases for internet companies, and they usually charge a few hundred dollars to put the details of your site into the hands of several thousand members of the media.
Those who are really serious about driving traffic to their sites will probably want to consider spending the extra money and investing in advertising, either on the internet or on some of the more traditional venues.
Virtually Ignorant Services
Directory Links - exchanging links is an important part of how the web grows and how people find new sites. We are interested in link exchanges with your site!
Contact Us -- We love to hear from our visitors.
That basically sums up our list. If there are other pieces of information you would like to know, or if you require any additional guidance on how to put together your site, feel free to Contact Us. We hope you find our site useful, and if you have any suggestions on how we can make it better, we would appreciate it if you would pass them along.
