Starting a business can be a very scary thing but if you are inadequately prepared, starting an Internet Business can be even more so. Where do I begin? What should I expect? How much should this cost? I hope to answer some of the common questions asked by business owners wanting to setup a website.

First you must register a domain name. This will be the address for your setup. Websites need to contain keywords but also need to be attractive to human readers, so do not get carried away by keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.com domain names. Keywords do help, but you want a name that is able to be branded as well. I register all of my domains with godaddy.com. They start at around $8 a year for a regular .com registration but sometimes you can get a good discount if you sign up for another godaddy service such as private registration. This keeps your contact information hidden from the public. If you would like to see what kind of information is publicly available, do a Google search for Who Is when ever you get the chance.

The next task is to decide where you will host your site. The two most common types of hosting are Shared Web Hosting and Dedicated Web Hosting. For most starter websites Shared Web Hosting should be sufficient, but larger websites should enjoy the added benefits of dedicated web hosting. Shared hosting is going to cost around 10.00 a month compared to dedicated hosting which can run around $75 or more a month. If you receive a large number of visitors a day, or have a fairly large database driven dynamic website, dedicated hosting is the only way to go. Most Search engine specialists will recommend a dedicated server over a shared server even for small websites due to the possibility that your site could theoretically be penalized for shady actions taken by other websites that share your sever and IP address. So if you choose to start off with shared hosting, shop around and make sure you will be sharing your sever with a reputable company that hosts reputable websites. Even though some companies offer webhosting for $3 or $4 dollars a month, it doesn’t mean it is a good buy. Spammers know where the cheap prices are, as they register them in bulk!

Now the fun part! The final task is the most challenging of all, the building of the website itself. You can outsource your web design with a website design company or you can opt to build it yourself. If you decide to build your own site, remember to practice common design recommendations like header tags and good text based navigation. Another important tip is to set a title, description and keyword tag in the head section of every page. A lot of people believe these tags are useless, but this is far from true. The title tag is the most important on page factor because it greatly affects ranking. The title tag is also important for enticing users to click on your listing as most search engines pull some of your listing information from the title tag. I try to keep my titles under 65 characters long. The description meta tag is also quite useful for ranking and can be quite a bit longer. Look at keeping your description under 250 characters, including spaces. I believe the keyword information is mainly used for categorization purposes. Just make a point to not repeat any words more than two or at the most three times or it may hurt you more than help.

For those with little or no web publishing experience, building a successful presence on the web can be daunting. Although it’s not necessarily easy, building a web business is not rocket science either. Almost anyone, with at least some computer experience, can build and operate a successful web business like we do. My wife and I own and operate a very successful retail Internet business selling nutrition supplements: Cactus Canyon

There are many pieces which need put together for the finished site to be effective. Most of the pieces fall within five basic categories.

1. Choose and Purchase a Domain Name: Before you can build a public web page, you will have to choose and purchase a domain name. For example, CactusCanyon is one of my domain names and is our main site. There are many domain registrars from which you may purchase the domain from. Their prices range from around $8.95 to $29.95.

There really is no reason to pay more than $8.95 for the domain name. GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain registrar, and I purchase all of my domains from them for $8.95 each per year. On GoDaddy’s home page is a search box which can be used to find available domain names. I suggest a .com name with no dashes for your main site. It should be easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and as short as possible. It is best if a keyword is part of your domain name, but this is not necessary.

For example, a good domain name for a site about dogs might be “dogstuff” Don’t force a keyword into the name if it will sound awkward. Short, and easy to spell domains are the ideal – with or without a keyword. IMPORTANT!!

Once a good name is found, do a search for that name in Google. You need to make sure if the name had a past owner, it won’t bring you grief. In other words, if the site had connections with a spam or porn site, choose another.

If the name still looks like a good one, sign up for an account with GoDaddy and purchase it. You may purchase it for any number of years. I suggest paying for at least two years. There has been some discussion as to whether or not new sites registered for just one year might raise a caution flag with Google since most spam sites are only registered for one year.

2. Sign Up With a Web Host: Although some Internet gurus host their sites on their own servers, most regular people use a hosting service. A host will provide a server with which you upload your web pages files to. It is on that server where people will actually be viewing your site. Although there are wide ranges of hosting plans available, most new sites will do just fine with a low cost plan.

Cactus Canyon was started with a hosting plan with GoDaddy for $3.95 per month. Our current hosting/E-commerce plan with Yahoo Online Stores costs $99.00 per month. But they have great starter packages for $49.99 per month. The most important service a host should provide is reliability. Their servers need to be available 99.99% of the time!

The second most important thing is tech support. In my opinion, there isn’t a better, low-cost hosting plan available than GoDaddy’s. Upgrading to a higher-end hosting package as needed is an easy process. I’m never in favor of going low-budget just to save money, but in this situation GoDaddy’s economy hosting package is more than adequate for most new sites. Once hosting is purchased, the host will e-mail the details needed to publish your site via FTP.

3. Build Your Website The next and most technical step is actually building the pages of your site. Those with no web design experience will find the learning curve quite steep. I highly recommend enrolling in a short-term web design class at a local tech school or community college. It is possible to wade through the process with the help of a book, but as with many things, a short class will speed the process. Be aware that most of the people who begin the process of building a web business will quit during this phase. One could hire someone to get the job done, but unless money is no object, this is usually not an option for the long term.

Anyone serious about owning an Internet business must learn web design. Although learning web design can be tedious at first, the good news is that only basic skills are needed. In fact, if a beginning web designer tries anything more complicated than text, border less tables and images for their site, the results will be counter-productive. As long as the site conveys a trustworthy atmosphere to visitors, all that is necessary for success is a simple, clean, and easy to navigate site.

Building trust can be as simple as talking to your visitors in a personal way, giving personal testimonials, including some pictures of yourself, etc. If you expect people to make a purchase or visit your brick and mortar store after visiting your site, they MUST trust you. Dreamweaver is the most popular web design tool. I use Dreamweaver and highly recommend it. FrontPage is another alternative, but I consider it a distant second place behind Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver will cost from $120 (on eBay) to $250 retail.

The good news is that there is a new option available for free! First Page 2000 is a great way to get started building websites. And it is FREE! It is not a robust editor like Dreamweaver, but it is more than adequate for beginners to make a great site with.

Here are just a few tips for getting started with your site:

o Unless the site will be very large, keep all the web page files and images in the same directory on your local computer where you are designing the site and on the host web server.

o Build your site within a borderless table about 790 pixels wide. Unless this is done, visitors using 800×600 resolution will need to scroll sideways to view your site. You don’t want visitors to have to scroll horizontally.

o Photos should always be in .jpg or .png format. The .gif format is fine for clip art, symbols, etc. You MUST optimize your pages with some program. You simply can’t take a photo from your digital camera and put it on your site. Most of the time those photos have huge file sizes. You MUST resize it AND optimize it for small file size. If you don’t have PhotoShop, go to eBay and buy and older version like PhotoShop 6. It will do all you will need and will not cost more than about $70.00. You will NEED a good photo editing software. Also, while you are there, buy a book on how to use PhotoShop. You have to know how to crop, resize, and optimize your photos.

o Keep your file names short with no spaces and no capital letters. Dashes are fine, but no more than two dashes should be in any file name. Multiple dashes in file names are often used by spammers.

o You may use either .htm or .html for your web page extensions. Use the same format for all your pages. Most sites use .htm

o Keep your site simple! Learn how to make a great looking site with only border less tables, images, and text. Trying to use Flash or fancy scripts will be counterproductive for beginning webmasters.

4. Upload (Publish) Your WebsiteAs I design individual pages for my sites, I like to upload them and view the pages as they appear on the Internet. Oftentimes there are path problems or other issues which don’t show up until publishing occurs. Although Dreamweaver and NVU have built-in FTP features for easy publishing, I have always used a stand-alone FTP program for publishing.

FTP Comander is an excellent and free FTP program. CuteFTP and ACE FTP are other programs I have used. They have a small cost but have more features. Even if the built-in publishing features of the web editors are used, there are still instances where using an FTP program may be required. It is best to learn how to FTP with one of these programs.

After publishing your site, always check your site on another computer besides the one you built the site on. There could be issues, such as incorrect file paths, which won’t show up unless the site is viewed on another computer.

5. Marketing Your Site After completing steps one through four, there is still one crucial step required before a site can be successful. No matter how great the sight looks, no one will ever see it without proper marketing. In fact, this step will be the most time consuming of all the steps. The marketing process is ongoing and will require steady work in order for the site to continue growing.

Although this step requires much work, it is by far the most rewarding. There is nothing quite like seeing your efforts rewarded with a first page listing in Google! Steps one through four are the mechanics of building a web business. Marketing requires the most thought, creativity, and knowledge of all the steps. Much of this book will deal with the process of marketing your site. At least 80% of all the work you do with your online business should be in the marketing area.

If you have been looking to find a hosting company that offers good, reliable and value for money low cost web hosting, the search can be time consuming, frustrating and downright confusing. The sales pages of the thousands of companies that compete in this market segment all seem to claim to offer the best service, the greatest features, amazing uptime, free this, free that, etc etc.

It can all get a little overwhelming at times and make you wonder which one to go with. But it doesn’t need to be so hard. A good number of these low cost web hosting companies actually offer very good customer service, good technical support, reliable hosting (uptime) and a host of other features and free incentives to get you onboard.

These companies are banking on the fact that they can keep you as a customer for years to come and will eventually make a good profit from you in the long term.

That is why most reputable low cost web hosting companies will offer you a range of free features that can help make your website successful. If your website is successful, it means you will grow and stay with them, and even possibly upgrade to a bigger package to meet your growing website needs.

Features that you should look for as a minimum to be included in your package are the following;

Free domain name – All good low cost web hosting companies now include a free top level domain name when you sign up for a minimum one year period. The name is yours to keep and in most cases can be transferred if you leave after a year.

Advertising Coupons – Receive coupons than can be redeemed with companies like Google and Yahoo in their advertising networks. A great way to kick start you marketing campaign without outlaying any of your own money.

Website Creation Software – Simple to use software that is part of the hosting package that allows you to create a website. The templates that are included with these software packages are professional and if you don’t have your own software, are an ideal way to get your first website published, for free.

Money Back Guarantee – All reputable low cost web hosting company will offer at least a 30 day money back guarantee. If there is no money back guarantee, don’t waste your time with that company. The last thing you need is a prepay a year’s worth of hosting, only to find that the company is awful and you can’t get out of your contract.

There are a multitude of other free features and software inclusions that these companies will have available for you and are extremely useful for your website. Most low cost web hosting companies will also have a live “chat” feature that allows you to question their sales team before you sign up. It is a good idea to use this facility to clarify any questions that you have before you actually commit to a hosting package.

With a little research, you will be on your way in no time at all.