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Create a Website - A Step by Step Tutorial for Beginners

If you've been wanting to learn how to create a website you've found the right place to help you take your idea and turn it into reality. You might already have an idea for your website, something you want to sell or something you're interested in and want to write about. This create a website tutorial will show you how.

At Create a Website you'll find the following:

Tips for effective Website Design
Guides and a Website Tutorial for how to create a website
Tips and strategies for how to make money online
How to make money with Google Adsense
Examples of simple money making web sites
Resources to help you plan and build a website
How to turn your hobby or expertise into a money making website
My Story - A Real Life example of profiting from a content-driven website

The Ingredients of a Great Website

The most difficult part of creating a website is coordination. To be successful, you not only need the right tools, you also ned to coordinate with other companies to get your Website onto the World Wide Web and to give it a meaningful address that will be found. In addition there are several ingredients that you must bring together to create a great website and to get that website found.

Web Pages

Every website is made up of individual pages. To create an individual Web page, you need to understand some basic fundamentals about Web page development and one of the most important ones is knowing about XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language), the modern language of the Web.

Web Space

Creating Web pages is fun but as long as the page exists on your own computer, you're the only one who can see it. To let other people to take a look at your Web pages, you need to put them on a Web server. On the Website Host page, you'll learn about your options for getting your first Web page online.

A Domain Name

There's a huge difference between www.mywebsitelocation.com/users/~jwinston239 and www.JamesWinston.com. You can get your own personalized domain name, if it's available. You can also select a domain name that is related to the content of our website. Domain names aren't free but if it's one that is available, they're not very expensive either. On the Website Domains page, you'll learn more about the thinking and planning that should go into the selection of a domain name for your website.

Web Design Tools

Creating a Web page from scratch in a text editor is for hard-core Web purists. For mere mortals, it's way to slow and painful to create a simple or a complex website that way. There are several excellent professional tools for Web page development. If you have a commercial program like Adobe's Dreamweaver, you've got a great tool to create your Web pages. But, even if you don't there are other many free or low cost shareware Web page editing tools available.

Hyperlinks

By itself, a single Web page won't do very much. The real power of the Web lies in the ability to link Web pages together. This hyperlinking is what let's your visitors move around your website and it's what let you organize your content by linking relevant sections or pages together.

Search Engine Optimization - Getting Found on the Web!

Build it and they will come may work for baseball fields in the movie Field of Dreams, but for Website, that mantra won't be successful. You can't just build your website, place it on a Web server, and expect people to find it and visit it. You may be the only one who knows that your site is out there. Most websites are found by people entering keywords in a search engine and clicking on a link to one of the sites that was returned in the list of search engine results. This is both art and science and if you want traffic to your website in large numbers, is one of the most important things you do.

What Kind of Site Will You Create?

This create a website tutorial will focus on creating a content driven web site. We'll provide information about ecommerce sites a little later. For now, we're going to focus on creating a valuable content driven website that gets a lot of traffic so whether you're looking to make money with your website or not, your website is going to attract a lot of visitors and thousands of people will know what you are about.

There are many types of content driven websites and which type you choose will impact the work you need to do to get your website running. Some of the different content-driven web sites include the following:

An Online Magazine
Blogs
Reference & Resource sites
Communities
Entertainment sites
Service sites

Getting Started with Your Website

There are several different kinds of websites on the Internet, but they fall into two main categories: 1) ecommerce sites where you have something to sell, and 2) content-driven sites to share information or other content.

You'll need to do a lot of planning to create a great website that will get a lot of traffic, but no matter what type of website you're going to create, there are just a few things that you must have.

A Domain Name - the address of your website
A Place to put your website - a Web host - running a Web server
Some simple tools to create your web pages
Some information and knowlege that you'll in this website tutorial
Desire and perseverance - You'll have to provide that!

Make Money with Your Content Website - SiteBuild It Web Host

I ran across Site Build It! in 2000 when I lived in Seattle. I had created dozens of websites for non-profits and educational organizations, but I had never tried to make money online. I was working for a failing dot.com at the time and was looking for a way to create a website and make money online.

I found Site Build It! and read about their philosophy of focusing on getting your web site to appear in the first two pages of Google search results so that it would get good traffic.

I passed at the time and seven years later, went back to Site Build It to create my first money making website, GuidesandTutorials, in which I made back my initial investment in three months.

It's been providing a nice monthly check ever since and I haven't spent a lot of time to make it grow.

After seeing the success I was having with GuidesandTutorials, I used Site Build It! again to turn my hobby of restoring old woodworking machines into another money making web site, Old-Woodworking-Tools.net.

Planning Your Website

Planning your web site is crucial to success especially if you're hoping to make money with your website. The Paretto Principle really holds true in creating a website... It's 80% planning and 20% creating. Read an article about Website Design.

If you take the time to do the research and some careful planning, your website is much more likely to turn out the way you want.

You really need to think it through, research the keywords and topics that will get the most traffic to your site and come up with a plan for development, writing content, and fine tuning it.

Creating Your Website

After you done your homework and research and carefully planned your website, then it's time to get started creating your site.

There are a lot of tools available to you. Some are free and others you need to pay for. Many are very good at providing the results you need and some don't work as well. Some require knowledge about HTML and programming and with others are as simple as using a word processor.

Adobe Dreamweaver seems to have become the standard web-development tool and depending on your tech savviness could be a great tool to create your web pages.

Dreamweaver is my tool of choice for creating web pages because it lets me create very simple HTML pages as well as more complex dynamically driven pages using programming like ColdFusion or PHP.

Here are some Dreamweaver Tutorials at GuidesandTutorials that you might find helpful.

Promoting Your Website

Website promotion is probably the most important aspect of creating and publishing your website. If you don't promote your website effectively, no one will know you and know one will be able to find you. If they can't find your website, you won't make any money. You must know how to build your web pages so that when a user searches for information using keywords in Google or other search engines, the search engine will display your results at or near the top of the list.

Website promotion begins with search engine optimization and it should be a part of your early planning. The bulk of your website traffic will come from search engines. Whether it's Google, Yahoo, or something else, everyone has their favorite search engine to locate the information they are looking for. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process for strategy of getting to the top of search engine results for the keywords or search terms that are relevant for your website.

For every page you create in your website, you should be thinking about how to get it to appear at the top of the search results in the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization Strategies
Directories

Monetizing Your Website

If you are interested in making money from your web site, there are many ways to monetize your site and generate revenue.

You might have a product to sell directly from your site. Google Adsense lets you earn revenue from clicks on ads that appear on your site. There are hundreds of affiliate programs that let you earn a commission from sales generated from your website.

Making Money with Google Adsense

If you've got good content on your website or you want to be able to generate enough income to pay for the maintenance and hosting costs of your site, Google provides a great program called Adsense that enables you to place targeted adds on your website and make money every time a visitor clicks on an ad.

When your visitor to your site visits a page, they will see Google ads that are related to the content of your web site. Every time a visitor clicks on an ad on your site, it generates revenue for you. Both of my sites, GuidesandTutorials.com and Old-Woodworking-Tools.net make money from Google Adsense ads.

Making Money with Affiliates

Becoming an affiliate marketer is another way to monetize and make money from your website. You don't need a product to sell, you simply have to have content that is related to someone else's product. Then you can become and affiliate of that company and earn a commission every time someone makes a purchase after clicking on a link or an ad from your content rich website.

More about affiliate marketing

All Other Guides and Tutorials

Create a Great Website
The Create a Great Website Blog...

Build a Website - Getting Started
Build a Website - Getting Started will guide you through the steps necessary to build an effective Website that accomplishes your objectives.

Website Objectives
Knowing your Website objectives is the first step to designing and building a great Website. Beginning with the end in mind and defining your objectives, you'll be able to work backwards and create the information and resources you'll need on your site.

Website Topics
You may know exactly what Web site topics you want to write about, but for a money making site, choosing a Web site topic can be one of the most important decisions you make

Website Host
Website host - Getting Space on the Web. This tutorial will teach you what you need to know about selecting a Website host.

Infolinks In-Text Advertising
This article explains how website publishers and bloggers can make money from their websites by using Infolinks In-text advertising links.

Create a Great Website - The Best Way to Get to the Top of Google!
Choosing your website niche is one of the most important decisions you'll make and it will have a huge impact on your ability to make money with your website.

Online Courses
Online courses from Create-a-great-website!

Create a Great Website Blog
Create a Great Website Blog

E-Commerce Website
Information and resource for creating an e-commerce website.

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