What do I need to build an internet site at home? Will it require me to get some expensive program or software for my computer? Do I need to get a faster computer?

Most people don’t realize that building a website is simpler than it seems and all it requires are a few simple tools and a little bit of knowledge. In the end your site might not be the flashiest thing on the block, but at least you can get your content and ideas online; which is what really matters most. And best of all; you will be able to tell family, friends, and colleagues that you built your site all by yourself!

These are five things that you will need to build your first internet site from home:

1. Computer with access to the Internet
2. Text Editor (Preferably Notepad)
3. Somewhere to learn HTML and CSS code (e.g. Smart Boy Designs)
4. Place to Publish Your Site
5. Imagination & Dedication

Computer with access to the Internet

What kind of computer do I need? Well, basically any computer! As long as it has an internet connection (it doesn’t have to be high speed) any computer will be fine. The reason why you won’t need a fast, high end computer is because many websites are made with simple text editors. (which don’t require fast processing speeds or RAM memory)

Text Editor

On your computer you will need a place to compile all of your code. This is simple. If you have Notepad, which almost all computers come standard with, you are in business. This is the program you will continue to use to type the coding for your website creation.

Somewhere to Learn HTML & CSS Code

This can be easily done by just sticking here at Smart Boy Designs. You can also pick up a book or two from your local library. Feel free to check out our tutorials and articles for further HTML & CSS coding information.

A Place To Put Your Site

You will need to find a place to publish your website. You can choose to either get your site hosted with a free hosting company (which will usually require ads be displayed on your site), or choose to pay for site hosting from a reliable hosting company. The fees associated with a small/personal hosting space is usually around $5 for the web space, and a yearly domain name fee of about $20. A domain name is the address users will type to find your site. (e.g. google.com, yahoo.com, etc…) For reliable website hosting I recommend polarPhase.com.

Imagination & Dedication

This is one of the most important aspects of building your own website. A website is your own little space on the web; and your thoughts, words, stories, and business ideals will be what brings your site to life! And remember that if you get stuck on a bit of coding - just keep on trying!

Conclusion

I hope you found this article to be helpful, and that it has increased your knowledge of website design and management. Remember that websites aren’t as scary as everyone makes them out to be!

Okay, I take that back - coding can get tough sometimes… :-)

The internet is an amazing thing, and to not use it would be a shame. Many people these days have their own websites, and it is that little place where people can build their own special world.

Making your website popular and big is a hard thing to do, but it is simple if you have one thing. Determination. If you have the will power to make your website incredible, it will become incredible.

After you have established what topic you want your website to be on, you will then have to start offering your visitors content. You have probably heard this time and time again, but people love content. People only go on the web for informational content, or good services.

Once you get lots of good content, I’m talking at least twenty pages, you will start to see a steady trickle of people. Lots of these people will find your content useful, and they will link back to your site. From here, your website will just grow and grow.

Once you get a good amount of links and visitors, do one more thing. Keep publishing content. If you keep publishing unique content, and continually update your site, you will all the sudden see that you have built your own web empire.

One day you will log on to the internet to see that you have gotten one thousand visitors. While you were sleeping! This will be when you feel the joy rolling in. Literaly!

The sky is the limit, and there is no reason why you can’t have thousands of unique visitors daily. It will just take time, determination, and loads of content. In the near future I hope to be competing with your online empire. Well, not really.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could publish a website, and floods of people would find it instantly? This isn’t the case in the real world, and that’s why many have so much trouble with this complex and interesting subject.

With the method presented in this article you could be receiving up to twenty unique visitors daily within one single month. Don’t believe me? Just follow the article and learn how…

Before you publish your site make sure you have a good topic and plan for what and how your site will accomplish its objectives and goals. Choose a subject that you enjoy and know the most about, as this will become your “golden subject.” If your site offers quality content and advice it won’t have any problem attracting new visitors.

As soon as your website is up and running submit it to the major search engines; Google, MSN, Yahoo. It will take a little while before you will be listed, but at least you can get into the search queue for the search engine robots. But before the robots list your site you better be sure you have a wide selection of good quality content…

The next step is to write at least three quality articles about your subject. Make sure they are long enough to actually give your readers good advice. After some time, your articles will get better, and you will become a better writer.

Post your articles on your website, and make sure that they get indexed by Google.

Once this is all accomplished, you can then submit your articles to a couple of the top article Ezines. These places allow you to submit your articles, then people are allowed to use your articles on their websites.

The cool thing about this is that you can put a bio and a link to your site on your articles.

This is what will get you your links, which will in turn bring visitors.

If people find that your articles are well written and that they offer good content, they will put your article on their website. Your article will start to pop up everywhere on the web, and people will start searching for your articles.

At this point, you will start to get loads of visitors, just from you writing a few articles.

You won’t have to worry about getting links because people will start linking to you because your offer great content.

Keep writing more articles, and soon you will have a large database of your own articles.

If you follow this guide, and have determination to make your site big. It will happen, and your web site dreams will come true.

One of the biggest concerns in a webmaster’s life is website visitors. This is one of the most sought after aspects of a successful website; yet it escapes the grasp of many. Here are some key techniques we have used to bring success to our own en devours.

Building your site is the easy part, getting people to visit your site is the hard part. Most people who have a site think that they can submit their site to Google, and visitors will just come flooding their doors. This is not true and it won’t work. The first thing to do when you build your site is to make sure your meta tags are in working order and that they target what your site is all about. Make sure that you have some of your keywords in your title, description, and the body of your page. Search engines love this, but make sure you don’t use to many keywords and a description that is longer than this article. Meta tag optimization is a whole nother topic, and we won’t go into detail here. The next thing to do is to manually submit yourself to the top search engines. Using free search engine submitters don’t always work and most of them are just a scam. If you manually submit, the search engines will like it better. Run a google search on search engines, and you will get a whole list of engines to submit to. After you fix up your Meta Tags, think about the content of your site. Search engines love having good quality content and they rank you higher for it. If your site is just a gateway page with hundreds of links, not very many people will come to your site, and the search engines will hate you. You want to offer something useful to your visitors, something that helps them. Think about publishing some articles, or anything else that your visitors will benefit from. People also love getting things for free. A lot of people will come to your site if you offer a quality service for free. It is just common nature for people to love free things. Dont you? You have now covered the first step in getting visitors, and that is to get your feet wet in the world of search engines. We will now move on to the next step, link exchanges.

Link exchanging is not only a great way to get visitors, but the search engines will rank you better if you have a good amount of links. Having links on other sites is a flag to tell search engines that you have a quality site. It shows that other people like your site, and not just you. This is where I am going to show you my favorite technique for getting link exchanges. First you must go to LinkPopularity.com. Here you will see a little bar at the bottom of the page. You are supposed to enter your own url to check how many people have linked to you, but what I do is enter the url of my competitors. Isn’t that great. You now have a whole list of contacts that your competitors have linked to. All you have to do is contact the owners of the sites about a link exchange, and you will most likely get your first exchange. I have learned this great trick from LinkPopularity and they have a whole article about checking your competitors links. Now that you know where to get your contacts, we must now discuss how to go about contacting them. Before you even think of contacting them, add their url to your links pages. This shows the webmaster that you are serious about a link exchange, and they are impressed by it. Somewhere in your email you can even mention that you have already added their link to your page. Your email about a link exchange could look something like this.

Hello, my name is (your name) and I would like to do a link exchange with your web site. My web site offers (what do you offer) and I thought that we would be good link partners. I have already taken the liberty to add your website to my links page, which is (your link page url).

Thank you for you time,

(your name)

Be sure to be friendly in your email and explain why you would be good link partners. If the webmaster accepts, you will get your very own link on another persons website. You now have a link on someones site, and your search engine rank will increase. After you have done this to as many people as you possibly can, do it some more. You can never have to many links. It makes your site well known to the world, and the search engines will crawl your site more frequently because they find your site by skipping from links on peoples sites.

I hope that you have learned something from this article and that you can maybe get a couple of new visitors because of it. Just remember, it takes patience to get visitors. I mean, you are one in millions of web pages, and that just means you have to work ten times harder than all of your competition to get visitors. In time, if you follow everything here, there is no reason for you to not have thousands of visitors in the next couple of months.

There’s nothing like waking up in the morning and doing your morning routine. Making breakfast, turning on the computer to check emails, maybe watch the news, or grab the trash can from the street. Then after all of your tasks you come back to your computer and find that it is STILL turning on! Okay, well, I guess it usually isn’t this drastic of a situation but everyone experiences a slowed down computer at least once in their “computer careers.”

This morning I decided it was time for some system wide maintenance on my desktop PC. Startup was lagging, execution time was delayed, and numerous other “slow” problems.

I felt that my biggest problem this morning was the fact that it was taking up to 5 minutes just to startup my computer. To remedy this problem my favorite little tool is the Startup tab via the System Configuration Utility window. First of all, you might be wondering whether this Utility Tool is still available in the new Windows Vista. For a quick and easy answer; yes! You can use this same method for both XP and/or Vista Operating Systems.

First find your “Run” program. This is where you will call upon the utility program. On a Windows XP system this can usually be found via Start –> Run. On a Windows Vista system look for Start –> Accessories –> Run.

Once you have successfully opened your “Run” program, type the command “msconfig.exe” into the command line. (type without the quotations)

This will bring up the magical System Configuration Utility program. Now at this time I must warn you that if you do not know what you are doing here; don’t touch anything. This tool controls your BOOT.INI file, your startup programs, your WIN.INI file, and a couple more technically touchy tabs. I repeat; don’t mess with anything unless you know exactly what you are doing. If your ruin things here, you cause troubles with your computer. End of story. Now for the lighter news…

If you select the Startup tab you will be presented with a list of programs with check boxes next to them. If the program box is checked it means that that program loads automatically each time you start your computer. If it isn’t checked then it does not load at startup. The reason for minimizing the amount of programs that load at startup is to speed up your computer when you turn it on, and to relieve some of your computer’s resources. Each program that loads at startup drains a bit of your computer’s processing resources; ultimately slowing down your computer.

Now the good news is that with today’s many resources on the web you can type each Startup Item name into almost any search engine and come up with many websites dedicated to explaining whether or not that program is crucial to startup, or if you can deselect that program.

For example, I deselected the following: ctfmon, MsnMsgr, QTTask, SOUNDMAN, BixFix, Microsoft Office, wcmdmgrl, and a couple more programs. But remember that I researched each startup item to be sure that it wasn’t crucial to my system’s startup.

After minimizing the amount of programs that ran on startup, I increased my boot time from 5 minutes down to 2 minute. That’s something that definitely makes me happy. :-)

Hopefully this little technology blurb has opened your eyes to the value of system maintenance and that you really do have control over speeding up your computer; not all is lost when your computer is slowing down. It just means it needs a little bit of TLC!