Website Technician

Want to start an online business? It can be fairly easy to do, but will require a bit of work. How much work depends on a couple of factors. A traditional HTML based site requires a bit steeper learning curve than a WordPress Blog as a Web Site. The easiest approach to an HTML based site is to find one of the thousands of templates available, many totally free of charge. I have tools available to help set up a Wordpress Blog as a Website.

Domain Name

A domain name is your address on the Internet. The domain name to this site is www.WebsiteTechnician.com. I recommend you own your domain name, not tagging on to a free service that has control of your business. What if your business takes off, hundreds of customers bookmark the link to your site. If it is part of a free hosting site and that host folds up, you are out of business. With your own domain name, that name comes with you. Picking a domain name can be a bit of a science. If you are up on to speed Search Engine Optimization, you probably have key words that your site will emphasize. If a domain name is available using those key words, get it. One of my other sites targetes the kew words: Barbeque Sauce Recipe, but barbequesaucerecipe.com was taken, so I got barbequesaucerecipe.net. Had the .net had been taken I would have gone with a hyphen in there somewhere.

Hosting

I use and recommend Lunarpages for a web host. They run $4.95 a month hosting specials all of the time and they will give you a free domain name for life, as long as your account is with them. The domain name is registered to you and is completely portable. They also use cPanel for site management. I’ve built sites for friends using another famous host. That host had a confusing layer upon layer of things to navigate just to get to some simple feature like adding email addresses. Lunarpages also includes $700 worth of free software. The best software there is Logo Creator by Laughingbirdsoftware. My logo above was made with it. There are a couple of other items there worth getting.

Another big plus for Lunarpages is the Unlimited bandwidth they allow. This is huge, allowing the use of embedded videos with no worry of extra fees associated with exceeding bandwidth limits.

Click here to check out Lunarpages for yourself

Payment Processor
Okay, now that you have your domain name and hosting, you will need to have a payment processor that will take payments for you.  The only way to go here is with PayPal. Almost everyone buying things online uses it, so there is no need to fight that trend by using something else. If you are just selling one or two items you can use PayPal’s ‘Buy It Now’ buttons and you are in business. If you have a lot of different things to sell I would recommend Mal’s eCommerce. I use their free shopping cart service and have a guide to setting it up. I even offer a free button code generator if you have Excel.

Using these building blocks, you can get a business started fairly quickly.  Promote it by adding good content and then get the word out. Try using SocialMarker.com or Traffic Bug to spread the word. There is a list of bookmarking sites there that you will need to set up accounts with, but that goes quickly.
Steve

The Lunarpages Web hosting Newsletter is out for June. Here are a couple interesting articles from it:

5 Freebies for June!
Author: Tiara Rea

I love free stuff (who doesn’t?). Whenever I go to hotels, I always steal the little shampoo and lotion bottles (my favorite is from South Point in Vegas!!), and whenever I go to Olive Garden I am obsessed with those chocolate mints they give you after dinner. Free stuff always has the ability to make me smile, because stuff is so much cooler when it doesn’t cost a cent.

So as a little summer gift for you guys, here are 5 awesome Freebies that you can use to design, redesign, or cleanup your website!

Read More

WordPress Links-o-plenty!
Author: Mitch Keeler

Time to take a trip back to the Lunarforums to see the latest links of the day. This time around, we took a look at WordPress, a popular blogging script that millions of people are using around the world daily. With that said, one of the most attractive things about WordPress as a script is the fact that so many have done so many things with it.

Here are all of the WordPress-inspired links of the day we collected.

Read More

Steve

Lunarpages is offering hosting for $4.95 per month with free domain name for the life of you account, this is $24 per year less than the usual fee. You can lock this price in for up to 2 years. (30 day money back guarantee)

Having Unlimited Bandwidth is huge, allowing you to host video content without fear of additional fees. Videos are exploding in popularity and are an important part of SEO and marketing your products.

Click on the Lunarpages banner on the right to take advantage of this offer, and to see what you get with signing up. One of the freebies is Logo Creator, Click here to visit their site. I created the logo at the top of this site using Logo Creator

Steve

If you have a blog and want to post images, maybe a Shopping Cart button or three, and a description of the object in the photo, it can get spread out and look a bit messy.

I have good news and bad news, first the bad news:  The solution is to write a bit of HTML code to organize things.  The good news is that I know how and have a free Excel Spreadsheet you can use to generate the code automatically. It is constructed on Excel 2002, so it might not work in all versions of Excel. It is powered by built in Visual Basic Modules, so it is quite automatic. Turn the Macros on, no virus in my version.

Here is what it looks like on my Tumbleweed Glass Site: Here

There is an instruction worksheet, one for a bit of data and two generator pages, one for those who use Mal’s eCommerce Shopping Cart (free) and one page for those who don’t. Upload checkout buttons to your server and it generates cart buttons tailored to the object you are selling.

Watch the embedded video or head over to YouTube and view In High Definition by clicking  Here

Download the file by right-clicking on the button to the right and choosing Save Link As..

Steve

How about a Blog as a Web Site.

Click on the photo below the Free Tutorial link on the right to get your .pdf document that takes you through every step necessary to having your own site without the headache of learning HTML. Most sites link to a blog from a traditional HTML or PHP page. You can skip that and go directly to installing a user friendly blog as your site.

The File has 12 steps that link to images and videos that simplifies the process into easy understandable steps.

If you have been thinking about your own site, now there is a great way to get started, and this is where you begin.

The .pdf files requires an Adobe Reader. Get yours free from Adobe
Click here to get your Adobe Reader.

Steve

I have a link at the top of the page to take you to my old pages regarding the setup of Mal’s eCommerce shopping cart.

Over the next few weeks we will be taking this site in a new direction. I am compiling a tutorial on using a WordPress blog as a web site, as is this site.

If the tools available for free here encourage you to get a free blog or purchase a domain name and sign up with a web host, we would like to hear from you. Send us an email by clicking the link at the top of the page.

If you choose Lunarpages please sign up via the link to the right.

This took considerable time to put together, so you might be curious as to why this site and it’s tools are free. There is no catch, and the only way that I might profit from this is if you sign up for Lunarpages by clicking the banner to the right,  I make a few dollars. If you phone to sign up, and you tell them to give me credit, using my affiliate ID, steve78412, then I will get paid.  You pay the same either way, get the bonus deals, and the lowest price available so there is no downside for you to sign up via my affiliate link. Also I like Lunarpages, with it’s cPanel features. Their affiliate program pays me much less than most web hosting affiliate programs, but they are an excellent host.