Build Your Website

SiteBuildIt was created by Ken Evoy (there's that name again!) specifically for affiliate programs, but it can be adapted for selling a product or service.

SiteBuildIt leads you through the process of building your website one step at a time. It helps you choose key words for the search engines. It automatically submits to the search engines for you and tracks your ranking. The price also includes registration of your domain name (yoursite.com) and a full year of web hosting.

It provides all of these services and more for one extremely reasonable price (currently around US$300.00).

Even though I have built other sites from scratch using HTML, this site was created using SiteBuildIt. The time I saved alone was worth the cost. And all the other extras just made using SiteBuildIt a "no brainer."

If you are an avid do-it-yourselfer (or SiteBuildIt is just beyond your price range right now) you will need software to build your web pages. You have two options:

1. learn HTML
2. use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) software

WYSIWYG Software

The obvious advantage of using WYSIWYG software is that you do not need to learn HTML. The main disadvantage is the price. MicroSoft FrontPage (the most popular) costs US$169.00 and Macromedia's Dreamweaver (popular among professional web designers) costs US$299.00! There are a number of cheap shareware programs available, but the ones I have tried are junk.

An excellent free option is Amaya . It was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which sets standards for the internet including the standards for HTML. Not surprisingly, Amaya creates letter perfect HTML code. Unfortunately, it is not the most user friendly software for a novice. For anything beyond a simple text page, you will need to directly edit the code (which means knowing HTML).

Learn HTML

If you are willing to learn HTML - and it is not as hard as you think - you will have greater flexibility in building your web pages. Even if you use WYSIWYG software (or even SiteBuildIt) knowledge of HTML can be very useful in making your pages look exactly the way you want them to look.

You can learn the basics of HTML from the free interactive tutorial at Dave's Site The tutorial explains HTML in plain English, step by step. It provides you with examples and lets you try out each new skill as you learn. It is highly recommended.

My favorite HTML editor is Arachnophilia. What I like most about it is the price - Free! It provides a number of tool bars and wizards to make your coding easier. It supports CSS and Javascript if you wish to get more advanced. Arachnophilia is only available for Windows (sorry Mac users).

If you are willing to pay for commercial software, HotDog Pro (US$99.95) is actually the best HTML editor that I have ever used. The creators of HotDog Pro have recently developed a new product for beginners called HotDog PageWiz (US$69.95). It combines HTML editing with WYSIWYG features. I have not tried it myself and reviews I have read are mixed. You can download free trial copies of both programs at SausageTools.com .

Keep the cost of this software in mind while you read steps 5 and 6. Add in the costs of domain names, web hosting and search engine submission and you will see why I consider Site Build It a real bargain.

Now on to step 5...