If you're a beginner, starting a website doesn't have to be difficult. If you begin with a good idea and take it step-by-step, you'll reap the rewards of a popular website.
Here are ten steps to online success:
1. Choose a domain name. Then, get it hosted.
Your domain name can be your own name, your company name, or a descriptive word for phrase describing what you do.
I often use GoDaddy.com for registration and hosting, but there are many inexpensive registrars and hosting services. Ask your friends for recommendations. Compare what the services offer, and read hosting service reviews.
2. Decide the theme or niche for your website.
Don't try to be all things to all people. For the best placement at search engines, select just one theme and build your site around that. If you want to expand, set up additional domain names and websites, one for each major subject.
For example, let's say that you're a writer and your website is about railroad history. Don't also try to include your favorite recipes or webpages about your skydiving service.
3. Create five webpages related to your theme.
If you don't know HTML, you can use a WYSIWYG program. (WYSIWYG = What You See Is What You Get)
If you have Netscape or Mozilla browsers, they include a free WYSIWYG program, Composer. There are other free WYSIWYG programs available online, too.
Your webpages should include an index.html (your main/entry page), another page that talks about you and how to contact you, plus at least three pages about your website's theme. Create links so that people can click from one page to the other, and already know what they're about.
If you're creating a website about your poetry, you might feature three poems--one each on a different page--or one page of your best poems, another to explain about writing poetry (and why yours are so great), and a third page that promotes another product that you give away (such as free online postcards featuring your poems).
4. Start a newsletter or ezine, to update people about your upcoming projects, where you've been published recently, and new webpages you've added to your site/s.
Yahoo Groups are free and easy to manage. Set yours to "announce only" (newsletter) and then let anyone and everyone join.
Or, use a free or low-cost service such as Ezine Director. However, make certain that they have a good reputation and don't do business with spammers.
5. Link to others, but only quality sites.
Links can be a very important factor in how well you're listed at Google and other search engines. Link only to websites that are very good.
Above all, do not sign up for one of those "Links4All" link exchanges. Also, avoid linking to competitors' sites. That might seem like common sense, but some new webmasters forget this.
After linking to others' sites, you can ask them to link back to you. Only a small percentage will do this, but some will.
6. Sign up for Google AdSense and/or affiliate programs.
If AdSense or affiliate programs are part of your income strategy--and they probably will be--sign up for them as soon as you can. In addition to Google AdSense, I like (and make money with) Amazon.com's Associates program, LinkShare.com and CommissionJunction.com.
At some of my websites, I also do very well with AllPosters.com and try to illustrate with their posters when I can.
7. Submit your site to the search engines.
Submit the URL of your index.html page to the search engines. Start with Yahoo and Google. DMOZ is important too, but it's vital to have a competitive and robust site built before submitting to them.
Do NOT over-submit. Check the search engine's rules. If you submit the same site to Google more than once a month, you risk being considered a spammer.
It can take search engines weeks or even months to list you among their pages. (It's normal to feel frustrated by how long it takes. Try to be patient.) And, even once you're listed, you may be in the "sandbox" for as long as eight months.
8. Start learning about keywords and search engine optimization.
Keywords can be the heart and soul of your success at search engines. Learn about keywords, and use them in the tags (META and Title areas) of your website and--even more importantly--in your webpage titles. Focus each webpage's content on three or four keywords that fit your niche.
9. Add one new webpage each week.
Now that you know your niche and have chosen a few words for your site's theme, add a new webpage to your site each week.
Every webpage should have valuable and interesting content. It should be at least 100 words long, but not more than 600 or so. (If it's longer, consider breaking it up into two pages or more.)
Each webpage should include one or two links to other pages. At least one link should be another page at your site, but you may want to link another high-quality website, too.
Every page should also link back to your home page (index.html) at the very least.
10. Tell people about your newest webpage.
Talk about your new page in your newsletter, ezine, or Yahoo! Group. Tell people in other groups, too, if their members might be very interested in your new page. (If many of them will be ho-hum, announce your pages every couple of weeks, or just put a link to your newest page below your signature, if the list rules say that's okay.)
At some search engines, you can submit new webpages as you put them online. Check each search engine's current rules to be certain.
If you have articles to share with others, submit them to a site such as EzineArticles.com. That's an easy source of free advertising.
Be certain to display your website URL on your business cards, invoices, letterhead, and everything that you print.
This will get you started. The Internet is a huge library of helpful information about website design and promotion. Read, learn, and grow, and you'll soon achieve success.
Eibhlin Morey MacIntosh is a published author, who writes travel and how-to books and articles. For more FREE tips and articles like this, especially for writers, see www.eibhlin.com/">http://www.eibhlin.com/
Family of Julie and Jessica Richards from Brisbane are ‘united in grief’ after receiving confirmation from New Zealand police
The press conferences have finished up. We will provide a summary of the new information shortly.
Watson says 22 of the 30 patients in hospital still need airway support. The nature of the burns suffered is complicated by the gases and chemicals in the eruption. This has necessitated more rapid treatment than is normally the case for thermal-only burns, he says.
He gives a breakdown of the number of patients at each hospital:
Jubilation at result but region faces long process ahead before it can become world’s newest nation
The autonomous region of Bougainville has voted overwhelmingly in favour of becoming independent from Papua New Guinea, paving the way for the group of islands to become the world’s newest nation.
More than 180,000 people in Bougainville, a collection ofislands flung 700km off the coast of Papua New Guinea in the Solomon Sea, participated in a referendum over the last few weeks that has been nearly 20 years in the making.
Democratic congressional leaders have unveiled articles of impeachment against Donald Trump, a historic move set in motion by a whistleblower complaint warning the president was using the power of his office to solicit foreign interference in a US election.
Company hails start of the ‘electric aviation age’ after 15-minute test flight in Vancouver
The world’s first fully electric commercial aircraft has taken its inaugural test flight, taking off from the Canadian city of Vancouver and flying for 15 minutes.
“This proves that commercial aviation in all-electric form can work,” said Roei Ganzarski, chief executive of Australian engineering firm magniX.
A medical secretary has claimed that her Facebook account was hacked after it was used to post false information claiming that a photograph of an ill boy on the floor at Leeds General Infirmary was staged for political purposes.
The woman denied posting the allegation that four-year-old Jack Williment-Barr’s mother placed him on the floor specifically to take the picture which became symbolic of the NHS’s troubles after it appeared on the front page of Monday’s Daily Mirror.
Panel recruited to ensure objectivity cite failure to agree formal process with police complaints commission
A panel of foreign experts overseeing an investigation into allegations of excessive force used by the Hong Kong police force has said it is stepping down, further calling into question the probe.
For months anti-government protesters have been demanding an independent investigation into allegations of police brutality in response to the demonstrations. The government has repeatedly said an independent inquiry is unnecessary and that the existing police watchdog, the Independent Police Complaints Council (IPCC), should complete its review first.
Scale and speed of loss much higher than predicted, threatening inundation for hundreds of millions of people
Greenland’s ice sheet is melting much faster than previously thought, threatening hundreds of millions of people with inundation and bringing some of the irreversible impacts of the climate emergency much closer.
Ice is being lost from Greenland seven times faster than it was in the 1990s, and the scale and speed of ice loss is much higher than was predicted in the comprehensive studies of global climate science by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to data.
Genaro García Luna, who ran Mexico’s federal police for six years, charged with accepting briefcases of cash to protect Sinaloa cartel
A former minister who was considered an architect of Mexico’s war on drugs has been arrested on charges that he allowed the Sinaloa cartel to operate with impunity in exchange for briefcases stuffed with cash.
Genaro García Luna, who oversaw the creation of Mexico’s federal police, was arrested in Texas on Monday.
• ‘Bereaved families should receive the justice they deserve’ • Liverpool make statement before flying to Club World Cup
Liverpool have supported calls by human rights groups for thorough investigations into the deaths of migrant workers in Qatar, before the club flies to the Gulf country next week to play in Fifa’s Club World Cup.
The Liverpool chief executive, Peter Moore, has also sought assurances from the Qatar “supreme committee”, which is organising the tournament and the 2022 World Cup, about the progress of investigations into the deaths of two men who had been working on the construction of football stadiums.
The literature laureateship, presented to Handke and 2018 laureate Olga Tokarczuk on Tuesday afternoon, faces boycotts and widespread protest
As Turkey joins Albania and Kosovo in boycotting Tuesday’s Nobel prize ceremony for Peter Handke over his support for Slobodan Milosevic’s genocidal regime, war correspondents from Christiane Amanpour to Jeremy Bowen are protesting his win by sharing their harrowing stories from the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
The Austrian writer, whose stance on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and attendance at Milosevic’s funeral have been widely criticised, is due to receive his Nobel medal in Stockholm, where a large protest demonstration is expected.
Decision grounds more than 300 military aviation students
Three US military members were killed in shooting Friday
The Pentagon announced on Tuesday it was halting operational training of all Saudi Arabian military personnel in the United States until further notice in the wake of the deadly shooting by a Saudi air force officer.
The decision will have far-reaching impacts, including grounding more than 300 Saudi Arabian military aviation students.
The Union Carbide factory explosion remains the world’s worst industrial accident – but as its dreadful legacy becomes increasingly apparent, victims are still waiting for justice
The residents of JP Nagar have no way to escape their ghosts. This ramshackle neighbourhood, on the outskirts of the Indian city of Bhopal, stands just metres away from the chemical factory which exploded just after midnight on 2 December 1984 and seeped poison into their lives forever. The blackened ruins of the Union Carbide plant still loom untouched behind the factory walls.
Photographer Judah Passow has documented those were affected by the Bhopal disaster 35 years ago, which killed an estimated 25,000 people ad has left more than 150,000 suffering from chronic medical conditions
Judah Passow has waived his fee for this work. Contributions to the Bhopal Medical Appeal can be made at www.bhopal.org
Exclusive: With heatwaves predicted to worsen dramatically over the next 30 years, many big US cities are failing to fully plan to protect those most vulnerable to extreme heat
When heatwaves hammered US cities this summer, one of the hottest in recorded history, some city governments had plans in place to protecttheir most at-risk residents.
Philadelphia’s plan sent homeless outreach teams to distribute water and bring people to cooling centers. Austin’s plan suspended electricity shutoffs for low-income or fixed-income customers. Chicago’s plan dispatched building inspectors to monitor shelters and other buildings without air conditioning.
A mile east of the Luís I Bridge in the middle of a residential neighbourhood in Porto, Portugal’s second city, sits a bleak and decaying building.
Initially a three-storey car park, then a thriving shopping centre, the building has more recently suffered from years of neglect. Its walls are sprayed with graffiti and plastered with stickers, and the windows are blacked out.
The mood may be one of despair, but this election is critical to the country’s future. The best hope lies with Labour, despite its flaws
Britain has not faced a more critical election in decades than the one it faces on Thursday. The country’s future direction, its place in the world and even its territorial integrity are all at stake, primarily because this is a decisive election for Brexit. The choice is stark. The next prime minister is going to be either Boris Johnson, who is focused on “getting Brexit done” whatever the consequences, or Jeremy Corbyn, who with a Labour-led government will try to remodel society with a programme of nationalisation and public spending.
Alexander Gabyshev says he wants to rid Russia of the ‘demon’ president
A Siberian shaman who says he wants to rid Russia of the “demon” Vladimir Putin has been detained by authorities after making a new attempt to trek across the country, rights activists have said.
Accompanied by two companions and four dogs, self-styled shaman Alexander Gabyshev set out from his native Yakutia in Russia’s north on Sunday after his first journey was cut short in September. He was detained by police on a highway on Tuesday, according to the human rights advocacy group Pravozashchita Otkrytki, which has been tracking his case.
Brutal winter, poor healthcare and limited food raises fears for welfare of infant, born to Sydney woman Rayan Hamdoush
An Australian woman has given birth to a baby boy in the al-Hawl camp in Syria, prompting revived calls for Australia to rescue 67 nationals still held in the camp.
Rayan Hamdoush, 24, from western Sydney, was pregnant when she entered al-Hawl. She gave birth to the boy on 30 November. The boy’s father, Samer Hajj Obeid, also from Sydney, is missing.
Repentance, reparation and remedy for the terrible damage done to the people of Bayelsa state in Nigeria is long overdue
• John Sentamu is the archbishop of York
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins: “All human beings … should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” It is now widely acknowledged that human rights cannot be enjoyed without a safe, clean and healthy environment. The right to a healthy environment is enshrined in more than 100 constitutions all over the world because human and environmental rights are intertwined.
Executive order could redefine Judaism as a race or nationality, which critics argue is itself antisemitic
Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order on Wednesday targeting antisemitism on college campuses.
First reported by the New York Times, the policy would broaden the federal definition of antisemitism, according to administration officials who spoke to various news outlets on condition of anonymity. By expanding protections granted by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to people subjected to antisemitism, the order could also redefine Judaism as a race or nationality.
NSW government to ignore most recommendations from inquest into drug deaths at music festivals
The New South Wales government will ignore the bulk of the recommendations from a landmark inquest into drug deaths at music festivals, with the premier, Gladys Berejiklian, saying she is “closing the door” on pill testing.
On Wednesday, the government announced its response to the findings of deputy state coroner Harriet Grahame’s inquest into six drug-related deaths of young people at music festivals in the state.
Premier League leaders urged to join fight for better working conditions as they prepare for Fifa Club World Cup match
As Liverpool fans stream into Qatar to watch the Fifa Club World Cup next week, it will be easy to forget the thousands of workers from the poorest countries in the region who have toiled for years to construct its glittering buildings.
When they take their seats at the Khalifa International Stadium, where Liverpool will play their semi-final match, they may not realise that scores of workers who refurbished the stadium were housed in filthy, overcrowded accommodation with an ever-present stench of raw sewage.
The devastating disease can’t be stopped unless more protection is provided for patients and health workers
Entering the city of Goma as night fell, I saw the red lava glowing atop nearby Mount Nyiragongo – an ominous reminder of the insecurity hovering over the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s volatile east.
But a manmade – not natural – terror is keeping health workers in DRC awake tonight.
Rights groups condemn hanging of Mooketsi Kgosibodiba and call on president to bring country into line with the rest of Africa
The new president of Botswana is facing pressure to abolish the country’s death penalty after last week’s surprise execution of a 44-year-old man for murder.
Mooketsi Kgosibodiba, a bricklayer, had been on death row since 2017 after strangling his employer in a row over stolen cement. Last week the government made the unexpected announcement that he had been hanged in Gaborone central prison.
From Israel’s hostility to Trump’s withdrawal of US funding, the UNRWA faces unprecedented challenges. Timely financial and diplomatic support is key
Today, on the 70th anniversary of its founding, the UN Relief and Works Agency, the UN’s main refugee agency serving Palestinians, is facing unprecedented challenges.
It has become a key battleground in Donald Trump’s war against multilateralism and his unilateral attempts to redefine the Middle East peace process along a track proposed by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
White Island’s eruption is a reminder that we are not nature’s master, but at its whim
At 2.11pm yesterday, as the Whakaari eruption was happening, I was out mowing my lawns. From my home at Te Kaha, a tiny settlement on the North Island’s east coast, you can make out the volcano’s sunken crater. The 300-metre dust cliffs frame the northern and southern edges, and in the centre is an east-facing pit where ancient birders and old sulphur miners once did their work.
On Monday the only workers and visitors on island were tour operators and tourists, several whom never made it back from yesterday’s destruction.
Five people have been confirmed dead, 31 remain in hospital with injuries and eight are still missing after sudden volcanic eruptions on Whakaari/White Island off the east coast of New Zealand.
The island is a tourist destination and 47 people were on it when it erupted on Monday afternoon. Three of those rescued have now been discharged from hospital.
The tranche of documents show that in trying to paint the best pictures, those involved delivered the worst
During the Vietnam war, the daily US military briefings were known to journalists as the Five O’ Clock Follies, described by one of the AP reporters who attended them as “the longest-playing tragicomedy in south-east Asia’s theatre of the absurd”.
The Pentagon Papers, the Department of Defense’s secret history of that war, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, only underlined the level of that deception under subsequent US presidents.
Trump’s neglect of the region has left a political vacuum that China is rushing to fill – and small nations such as the Solomon Islands are stuck in the middle
If anything demonstrates the interconnectedness of the 21st-century world, it is how a decision made in the Solomon Islands, population 650,000, in the remote South Pacific, can affect the behaviour of powerful countries on the other side of the globe. That, in a way, is exactly what happened last week when Nato leaders met in London. Top of their agenda was Donald Trump’s demand that Europe pay more for its defence. But why is the US so exercised about so-called “burden-sharing”? In part because, these days, it is looking west, not east.
The US has identified China, not Russia, as the biggest strategic, economic and potential military rival to its global leadership. Barack Obama, who was dubbed the “Pacific president”, formalised this shift with his 2011 “pivot to Asia”, which prioritised the region.
House Democrats have introduced two articles of impeachment against Donald Trump for high crimes and misdemeanours. At a press conference announcing the move, the House judiciary committee chair Jerry Nadler accused the president of betraying public trust and endangering US national security to benefit himself
The families of those missing after the White Island eruption in New Zealand say they are 'standing together' as they wait for information about their loved ones. Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand's prime minister, said the scale of the disaster was 'devastating' and that reconnaissance flights had found no sign of life on the island. Police have launched an inquiry into the eruption after at least six people died and many more were injured
Houston's police chief Art Acevedo criticised politicians for not standing up to the National Rifle Association after the the fatal shooting of an officer. 'The NRA doesn't like the fact that we want to take firearms out of the hands of boyfriends that abuse their girlfriends. And who killed our sergeant? A boyfriend abusing his girlfriend,' Acevedo said
A protester, appearing on the side of President Donald Trump and against impeachment, shouted at committee chairman Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat, that he and the Democrats are committing 'treason' in their inquiry
New Zealand’s Whakaari/White Island volcano erupted on Monday at 2.11pm as 50 people were visiting the country's most active volcano. At least five people were killed and authorities confirmed some people were still waiting to be rescued hours after the eruption on the island, as experts explained it was unsafe for emergency services to return
Footage shows island in the Bay of Plenty coated with ash after volcano blew debris 12,000m into the air. The film also shows a downed helicopter and tourists stranded on the island waiting to be rescued by boat.
New Zealand has been hit by a weekend of severe storms, with landslides and flooding in the South Island cutting off towns and trapping an estimated 1,000 foreign tourists.
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