How to build your own website

In most cases you will need a website to make money online. In this chapter I will describe some ways to do that.

How to build a website to make profits

There are many ways to build a website to promote your products. They vary from easy to complicated and from free to expensive. It depends on your knowledge, money and time which one to choose.

The easiest and more expensive way:

Site Built It

For $ 299,-- a year you can build a professional website with Site Built It. They offer lots of simple tools, instructions and other help on how to do that. You don't need any knowledge of computer programming or programming languages. Included is a domain name and unlimited band with and space. If you sign up through this link, you can get ond month free trial. The cheapest ways:For a website you need a hosting provider and a domain name. There are free hosting providers around but I would not advise that because you don't get your own domain name then or you get ads on your website. If you can't afford it howver, then just start with it and try to make some money so that you can change to payed hosting later.

The not so difficult and cheaper way:

First of all, you need a domainname and hosting space for your website.
Costs and quality of hosting and domain names vary a lot but it is possible to get good quality hosting for about $ 5,-- a month.

At Hostmonster the price for hosting starts at $ 5,95 a month if you choose for a 3-year hosting period and for $ 6,95 if you choose for a year. For that you get unlimited webspace and unlimited bandwith.

Another big pro of Hostmonster is that they offer many scripts and tools that will make it very easy for you to build your website. These are all pre-installed and with one mouse click they will be ready for you too use. Very popular scripts and tools they offer are an easy website builder with a lot of templates, the content management system Joomla and the weblog software Wordpress. Joomla is a so called content managent system. It is where we built all our websites with. Joomla is a free and open source but it has to be installed on a webserver. Lots of providers offer webhosting with Joomla pre-installed so that is a good option.

For building a website with Joomla you don't need a lot of technical knowledge but some basic knowledge of html can be handy.

There are lots of free templates available for Joomla to choose from but sometimes you need or want to make some adjustments to it and then some html knowledge is required.

We won't go into the details here because there is also a free Joomla course on Open-Of-Course. If you rather would start with Joomla without studying it, you could also order this package with ready built Joomla sites, video tutorials, a template maker and lots more.

Wordpress

If you like writing, it might be worth while to choose for a weblog instead of a website. Wordpress is a very professional free application through which you can create a weblog quite easily. Like Joomla, Wordpress also has to be installed on a webserver. Most providers that offer Joomla pre-installed, also offer Wordpress.

Wordpress comes with an online text editor and it is very easy to work with.

This is an example of my own weblog (in Dutch) created with Wordpress. There are lots of free templates available for Wordpress so yours can look totally different.

If you still find these scripts too difficult to start with, Dotster also offers an Easy Site Builder, where you can create your websites with.

Visit Hostmonster to check out their offers. A free domain name is included!

The Complicated Way

Study html, php, java and/or other programming languages and go ahead.. Warning: it will take a long time. These time you might use better to monetize your website. Ideas for that are described in the rest of this course.