Creating Personal Web Sites (Part 2)

by Ashish Jain

This is the second part of a two-part article about creating a web site on the Internet and the tools that you will need to do it.

Some basic terminology that you should take a look at before proceeding further:

Web Page: A document that contains information created with the help of HTML.
Web Site: A collection of web pages on a particular subject.
HTML: Also known as Hyper Text Markup Language it is used for the creation of web pages. Information is written in between HTML tags ( ) to instruct the web page as to how the information will be displayed. You can also put images into the web page by using this language. Some other languages like JavaScript, VB script, ASP, ASP.NET etc. are also used to display dynamic content on web pages and for performing user driver events.

There are basically two main categories of web sites:

Personal web site: These include websites that are about individual human beings.
Business web site: Includes web sites that advertise and inform users about the products and services that a company is selling.

This article will deal with creating web sites for small businesses and putting them on the web.

The Internet is one of the best ways to reach out to people and advertise your services. If you are a small business you will think twice before advertising your services in traditional forms of media like radio, TV and newspapers. However, advertising on the Internet is very cheap, for a fraction of the price that you might pay for advertising on TV you can reach out to millions of people.

Your site acts as a virtual storefront through which you can sell almost any type of good or service.

Having a presence on the web gives you a competitive edge and puts you on equal ground with others to compete while enabling you to reach millions of customers who browse the Internet on a daily basis.

You can create your own site and you do not even need to have knowledge of programming. All you need is creativity and an eye for design.

It must be mentioned that you can create your site by going to web sites that provide free hosting services. On the other hand, you will notice that these kinds of sites do not give you your own domain name. You will always get something like: http://www.somesite.com/yoursitename

This simply doesn’t look very professional if you want to project an image of a serious business. Think about it yourself, would you buy from a site that does not even have its own domain name?

There is lots of software out there that can help you make a web site. These types of software are basically WYSWYG editors i.e. ‘What You See Is What You Get’. They have a point and click interface and are suited for both beginners and advanced users.

1st Page 2000 –http://www.evrsoft.com/1stpage2.shtml
NVU – http://www.nvu.com/

These are two of the best sites that I would recommend and have a very easy learning curve.