Unless you have programming and design skills, this route has the same drawbacks as asking a friend or family member to do it with the additional downside of wasting your time. It does take time and training to become competent in web design and programming, and you don't want to risk customers seeing a "worse than nothing" website when they check you out online. However, if you are dedicated, learning to program and design your own website is an option.
For the best of all worlds, new online website building tools that give you ultimate control over content and appearance, and can be mastered by anyone who can "point and click," are another option. To see a review of the best online tools, click here.
Program and design your business website yourself: If you have the time and enthusiasm, this might be the route you choose, but you want to know what you are getting yourself into.
Programming Languages: HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is the "language of the web." The main programming language used on the Internet, it works on a system of tags embedded in the web page that determine how text and graphics will appear: color, size, alignment, position, etc. Although you can learn the basics of HTML fairly quickly, it takes a lot of time and trial and error to become enough of an expert to be able to write the code that enables advanced features and graphics. Other more advanced languages and tools such as JAVA, CSS, Flash, and Shockwave will take even more time and skill to master.
Software: You can use MSWord to save a simple text web page for your website, but there are other more sophisticated software packages that you can purchase to make the web design process fairly straightforward for the new programmer. These include MacroMedia DreamWeaver and MS FrontPage.
Using software is much easier than trying to learn programming language or layout and design skills, but there are still some drawbacks:
* The HTML that the template writes at your "drag and drop" command can be sloppy and filled with trash code (although this is less of a problem with DreamWeaver than with FrontPage). If you plan to always use the same software to update your site, it shouldn't be a problem, but it might make things difficult if you ever switch software or ask a web designer to go to your site to update it for you.
* FrontPage sites look perfect in MS Explorer, but not always in Netscape, Opera, or any of the other browsers your customers might prefer to use.
* DreamWeaver sometimes has problems displaying Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) correctly.
Uploading: Uploading is the process of transferring your website from the computer where it was built to the server where it can be viewed on the Web, usually using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol).
* Uploading is quite a detailed process. The software will guide you through it, but you must be sure to enter the necessary information (e.g. profile name, host address, host type, user ID, user password, etc.) correctly, or the process will fail.
* If you hire a web designer, she will handle it.
* You are responsible for the uploading process yourself if you choose to design your own site using software such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver.
* Uploading is not necessary if you use one of the new, online website building tools now available for small business owners. With an online website building tool, you build the website live on the Web thus avoiding the whole uploading process.
For a summary comparing the various ways by which you can get a website, see Table 2.
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