Websites

I suppose if you are going to get into this internet marketing lark the first thing you are goingto need is a website of some description.

This may be easy for me to say (with 20+ years experience in software development) but actually puting together a site is not too difficult. In fact most pc's will come with ms FrontPage which is perfectly adequate for the job and if you can use ms Word you wont have any trouble.

What is sometimes a bit baffling for a newcomer is - how the hell do you get your nice shiney new website from your pc into cyberspace?

The first thing you are going to need is a hosting service. Of course there are more of these vying for you money than you can shake a stick at. It is definitely a case of "you pays your money you takes your choice" if you Google for "web hosting" you will no doubt get a load to choose from. My advice would be get a package with the largest bandwidth you can get for your budget - you don't want that potential diamond to be blocked out of your site because of too many users. Apart from that you don't need too many whistles and bells unless you have loads of multimedia content.

One company that I have used for a number of sites is Streamline.net who offer some excellent value for money packages with free domain name registration. There's a link at the bottom... (yes that is my affiliate link. If you object to that just go to the main page and register there :-) By the way that is for UK sites only, sorry!)

 So now you have somewhere to put your site how are you going to get it there? You need to use FTP.

What?!

That's File Transfer Protocol to you.

Never heard of it!

No problem! you don't need to know how a V6 3litre turbo charged engine works to drive a BMW M3 (what, you dont drive one? stick with the program and you will, trust me!)

FTP Surfer is a great free tool for transferring files to your host, (download a copy here - http:www.whispertech.com/surfer/index.htm ) and operates just like windows explorer so you can just drag-and-drop the files you want to transfer.

OK there you are - not that difficult, eh? Want some more help? Just drop me an email, I'll be glad to help...

Streamline link - http://www.streamline.net/?aff=258d6fe24075db9d6a66801aea777287