The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your First Business Website

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Chọn Tên miền Quyền Sử dụng Samurai thị trường Để Tìm khoá Đăng ký tên miền của bạn Chọn Một công ty Hosting Chuyển Giới thiệu tên miền của bạn Để Joomla! Cài đặt Joomla! Sử dụng Joomla! Nếu phạm của Quá tốt Quá Be True ... Nó thường là! Cài đặt A New Tiêu bản Tạo Một hệ thống Menu Tạo Logo mới của bạn Sử dụng phần mềm FTP Filezilla Thêm Logo của bạn Để Các hình ảnh Tiêu bản Làm việc với Modules...

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Nội dung Text: The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your First Business Website

The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your First Business Website This book is written by Mike German. For my other eBook "Make Money With Mike - The eBook" please visit my website: www.make-money-with-mike.com VERSION 3 – JANUARY 2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this eBook may be reproduced, duplicated, given away, transmitted or resold in any form without written prior permission from the author. Mike German 2010 Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Contents Chapter Page Introduction 4 1. Choosing The Right Domain Name 6 2. Using Market Samurai To Find Keywords 8 3. Registering Your Domain Name 11 4. Choosing A Hosting Company 14 5. Transferring Your Domain Name 17 6. Introduction To Joomla! 18 7. Installing Joomla! 21 8. Using Joomla! 23 9. If It's Too Good Too Be True...It Often Is! 30 10. Installing A New Template 32 11. Creating A Menu System 38 12. Creating Your New Logo 43 13. Using Filezilla FTP software 44 14. Adding Your Logo To The Template Image 46 15. Working With Modules - Search Box 49 - Log-in Box 51 16. Backing Up Your Databases 57 17. A Final Word 58 Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Introduction Hi my name is Mike German and you're about to discover what might be the most sought after hidden secrets of professional website design. I would like to share with you all, my web design secrets of the trade in this eBook. Other web design companies DO NOT want you to know this information as it will let you into the inner circle of web design and will expose the secrets web designers want to hide. Many use the methods I will share with you and charge you, the customer, hundreds, even thousands of pounds by bombarding you with computer jargon and technical information that is designed to baffle and confuse. I am primarily a graphic designer and had little to no knowledge of web design programming. But over the last 5 years I have gained all of the skills and knowledge to creating great websites from choosing the right domain name, designing very technical websites and hosting them on my own servers. I have spent months and years learning everything to do with this industry and by making mistakes along the way I have finally realised how it is done and what not to do. I have stripped out all of the unnecessary jargon and written this plain speaking eBook which explains everything you need to do to create stunning business websites in under 15 minutes! And all for ONLY £3.48 per month! (The cost of your domain name and web hosting) You are about to discover what is the most popular FREE website creation software in the industry that may be a web designers best kept secret! You will learn how to build and manage your own website that is hosted on your own servers using your own unique domain name such as “www.your- domain.com” in a few very easy to understand steps. Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Introduction I am NOT referring to the many companies out there that use a step-by-step Click & Build method like the one on www.homestead.com for example. On the surface these “instant website” companies look good. They have an amazing range of quality, professional templates to choose from as you build your website. But before you sign-up to one of these companies… STOP! and read my eBook and you will discover the No.1 reason why you MUST do it my way. Regards and Good Luck Mike German Vizual Art Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Chapter 1 Choosing The Right Domain Name Before you do anything, you MUST get this bit right. It will be the foundation of everything that is built from this point on. Your domain name is the starting point when deciding on having a website. It will represent you and your company, so is a very important step very early on. If you intend for your website to be found by the major search engines for your business sector the domain name you choose will play a very important part in being found. Why can't I just use my company name as my domain name? Well if you are a plumber for example and your company name is D&I Plumbing you would assume that registering www.dandiplumbing.co.uk might be the obvious choice. It's not a bad start because the name mentions “plumbing” in the domain name. The problem is how relevant to anyone searching for plumbers is the “dandi” prefix? Nobody looking for plumbers would ever type in dandiplumbing as a search term. You would try “plumbing” or “plumbers” or more likely for this market you would also include a local search i.e the town or city you live in. So your search would look more like this: “plumbers Peterborough”, “Peterborough plumbers”, “plumbing in Peterborough”. These search terms are niche terms that will concentrate the search on plumbers in the Peterborough area only. But this is merely speculation. You can assume that people must be searching for “plumbers Peterborough”, but wouldn't it be great to know that for definite? So with this information it's time to see what is really being typed into the search engines. To do this you will need to carry out Keyword Research. What is Keyword Research? Quite simply a Keyword is the word that someone types into a search engine. To do Keyword Research you will discover what words are actually being typed on a daily basis. If you know this information, you can then begin to piece together a picture of what keywords will work for your new domain name. Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Chapter 1 Choosing The Right Domain Name What has a keyword got to do with a domain name? Everything basically. The major search engines, i.e Google being the largest, use a series of algorithms that their robots use to crawl the web for websites to list. One of the known factors is the domain name of your website. So I should call my domain name www.plumberspeterborough.co.uk? You can, but this was based only on an assumption that's what people are typing when searching for local plumbers. We need to use software that will analyse the top search terms for Plumbers and Peterborough. There is no point choosing plumbers Peterborough on the assumption it is right. What if that particular phrase has no or little searches per day? It would be a waste of time using that name for your domain name if nobody was even looking for it! What software can find this out? There are numerous software packages out there that will find out this information, but having used a great deal of them I can recommend one in particular. If you visit www.marketsamurai.com you will be able to download this software and some very helpful video tutorials absolutely FREE for a limited trial period. This is a very comprehensive internet marketing tool that I will explain in greater detail in future eBooks. Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Chapter 2 Using Market Samurai to find keywords When you have installed Market Samurai you will be given the option of starting a new project or opening an existing one. Choose the new project to begin. Enter the main keywords of your business in the Keyword box, i.e plumbers peterborough. This can also be used as the Title. Then choose where you want to save this project in File. Then click Create. You will now see a screen with 8 options displayed. You need to choose Keyword Research from the list. You will now see the intro Keyword Research screen. For the purpose of domain name research you can simply click on the Generate Keywords button in the top right, as we do not need to add extra keywords at this stage. After a short time your results will be displayed in the results window. There may well be over a hundred results here, but you can filter out words and phrases that are irrelevant. So eliminate keywords that are not associated with your business and then click on Analyze Keywords in the bottom right. This may take a bit longer to return these results depending on your internet speed. Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Chapter 2 Using Market Samurai to find keywords You will now see the main Keyword Research screen. The table may look very confusing at first, but I will lead you through what you need to be looking at. Searches and SEOC We are interested in two main areas of this table. The first being Searches and the second, SEO Comp or SEOC for short. In the top section of this screen we will see a title Competition and a sub heading below called SEO Comp (SEOC) with a plus symbol next to it. Click on the plus symbol and enter a number of 10,000. This is the amount of web pages globally that mention a specific keyword in Google's index. The lower the number the better. The left column displays various keyword options from the Keyword Research results. What we are looking for are the keywords with a high amount of Searches and a low amount of Competition (SEOC). If your chosen keyword phrase for your company returns a result of 0 in the Searches column there will be no point choosing this for your domain name as it is not being searched for. If you need to modify your keywords to try other words click on the Modify Keywords button in the bottom right and you will return to the previous screen. Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Chapter 2 Using Market Samurai to find keywords In our example of “plumbers peterborough” the results show there are 24 searches a day and a competition of 5290 websites globally that contain the phrase “plumbers peterborough”. As this phrase is highly relevant to D&I Plumbing who are based in Peterborough; have 24 searches a day and a moderately low competition level it is an ideal phrase to use for their domain name. This may take a bit of practice at first to master, but you will soon get the hang of it. It took me a few late nights before I had it perfected! Please bear in mind these top tips before choosing your domain name: Summary 1) Do not assume your company name is the best domain name to select. Carry out some keyword research before making a decision and consider incorporating a keyword alongside the brand name. 2) Short is better if we can do it, but simple phrases can be fine. Too long and we might get more typos. 3) Keywords (which people actually use from your Keyword Research) in a domain are useful in making it clear what the site is about. 4) Show a preference for .co.uk top level domains (TLDs), but don't despair if we have to use other TLDs. Any TLD can be brandable - it's just a bit easier with .co.uk in the UK. 5) Most people should avoid trade name and trade name typos. Domain squatting on these kinds of names can lead to costly legal battles. 6) Do grab the mistypes of your own domain. Not for SEO, but to get traffic that might have not otherwise reached you. Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Chapter 3 Registering your domain name So we have completed the Keyword Research; found the competitive keywords with high traffic and low competition and now we must find out if your new domain name is available to buy. There is nothing more annoying when you have researched thoroughly what name to use and somebody else has registered it already! This is what you can do if this happens to you: (i) Contact the existing owner directly and make them an offer (ii) Use a domain broker like Sedo.com to negotiate the price for the domain (iii) If your brand is strong, you could try out a different TLD (a .net or .com instead of a .co.uk), or if your brand is new or not well known, try a variant domain (mybrand.com instead of brand.com) The easiest and indeed cheapest approach is the last option. There are a number of ways to subtly change your domain name and still carry the same keyword strength. There a several websites I have found that offer an automated service for finding domain name variations. The best one being www.domainsbot.com where we simply enter your chosen domain name in the search box and let the software find all the available domain names either the same or similar to your search. The great thing about this website is you don't have to keep trying different combinations as they will all be listed for you in the results table. Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Chapter 3 Registering your domain name How do I buy my domain name? Domainsbot.com do offer a Buy Now option from their website, but you cannot purchase your domain name from here as they are not actually a Registrar. When you click the Buy Now button you are presented with a drop-down list of Registrars listed with Domainsbot.com and my favourite one is not there. The easiest and cheapest at the moment is www.namecheap.com which is precisely that – your name is cheap to buy, but the service and ease of use of the Top Tip website is excellent. Please click this link to setup your If you want a .co.uk Name Cheap account now. www.namecheap.com extension you will have to click on the More I'm on the Name Cheap website, now what? Extensions Available>> The first thing to do is enter your domain name in box 1 link and choose it from the titled “Enter the domain name you want” drop-down list. Then tick .com in step 2, then click on Search. Now check you have a tick next to the .com domain name. Now scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on Add to Cart (as shown). The total price is for a 1 year duration (for all .com extensions)will be $9.69 which is just under £6.00. You will then need to sign up for a free account by supplying your name, email and password, so very quick and convenient. Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Chapter 3 Registering your domain name When you reach the payment stage you are given the option to pay by usual credit card or funds direct from your Paypal account, if you have one. Once you have successfully paid for your new domain name you can view the details my clicking on My Account on the menu, top right. You will now see the title Account Information and underneath a list of options. Click on the first option “Number of domains in your account” by clicking the “view” link next to it. This is where all of your Domains will be listed. So if you decide to buy further domains for future projects or for anybody else, this is where you will manage them. If you now click on the link to your domain name in the table you will be taken to the Your Domains page. You can now assign ownership of your domain name to yourself or anybody else if you wish. You may wish to assign a different contact for the Technical person looking after your site. Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Chapter 4 Choosing a Hosting Company This is the number 2 secret of the trade I will share with you in this chapter. This will make everything else from this point forward very easy, even for those of you with little to no computer knowledge all at! The word on the web is “cPanel” It stands for Control Panel and is the #1 used control panel in the world. If it were not the best I wouldn't be using it. You MUST ensure the hosting company you choose has this system in place. It will make your life of web design much easier and won't cost you any extra. What is cPanel? It is quite simply the best thing you will ever use in web design management. When you have ordered your hosting package you will then have access to your Control Panel (cPanel) where everything is managed. Here is a list of the main features you will get: Fantastico: Instant Shopping Carts, Content Management Systems, Blogs, Portals, Forums, Counters, Formmail Website Statistics: AWStats, Webalizer, Raw Log Manager, Referrer and Error Logs Password Protected Directories and Custom Error Pages Web Based File Manager, Hotlink Protection, IP Deny Manager, Redirect URL Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Chapter 4 Choosing a Hosting Company What is Fantastico? You will wish you knew about this year's ago! This is number 3 of the best kept secrets of web design. That's two big secrets in one chapter! Which is probably why you had never heard of it, until now! Fantastico is an icon on your cPanel, which allows you to automatically install the best Open Source web design software in the industry. You may have heard about web design companies offering CMS web design , Wordpress blogs or even Oscommerce shopping carts? They are industry standard applications that make complicated technical scripts and coding a thing of the past. This could do to web design what digital cameras did to film processing labs. What are the best Web Hosting Companies? Feel free to search the web for different hosting companies using cPanel to compare prices. But I have already spent time doing this for you and my #1 choice is www.hostgator.com They are one of the largest, but cheapest hosting companies in the world with an incredible customer support team behind them. I am not telling you, you MUST use them because, it is your choice, and you're paying after all. I can only recommend them, but I am telling you to insist on cPanel Here are some of their features: Unlimited Disk Space and Bandwidth Flexible, Easy to Use Control Panel (cPanel) Unlimited Sub Domains, FTP Accounts, and Email Accounts 99.9% Uptime Guarantee No Contract with a 45 Day Money Back Guarantee Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Chapter 4 Choosing a Hosting Company How much will it cost me? Very little, is the short answer. I was surprised the first time I used them. If you only have one website for your company you will only need their cheapest Plan called the Hatchling Plan (see left) for an incredible $4.95 per month which is under £3 per month for Unlimited Disk Space AND Bandwidth! I bet you can't find a web design company that is offering unlimited web hosting for as little as this without charging you extra for the web design! Some companies will offer FREE hosting and a domain name for 12 months, which sounds great, but it is used as a hook to get you to use them. You are charged typically between £400 - £800 for your website which more than covers the domain name and hosting costs, as it will only cost the web design company about £42 for a whole year! This is the calculation: Hosting = £3/month /12 months £36.00 Domain Name (.com) /12 months £5.80 TOTAL COST £41.80 If you then work this out per month it will only cost you £3.48 per month!!! This is why this information is kept a closely guarded secret, until now! When you have read this eBook there will be no reason why you would ever pay a designer up to £800 for your business website ever again! You will also discover how quickly you can get your website online and therefore saving time and money. So if it can really be this quick and cheap, the web designers are charging you hundreds of pounds for their knowledge, which I am giving away free of charge in this eBook. So you're in a WIN WIN situation! And there is NO catch whatsoever!! Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Chapter 5 Transferring your domain name How do I transfer my new Domain Name to my hosting company? I will use Hostgator as my example to explain this. Other web hosting companies may vary slightly. After buying your Plan you will receive an email of your order confirmation. You need to look for a title called “Your name servers” and below will be something like this: ns1.websitewelcome.com ns2.websitewelcome.com These are your Domain Name Servers or DNS for short. Make a note of the server names or copy to your computer's notebook for later pasting. We now need to re-visit www.namecheap.com where we registered your domain name and log-in to your account. Now navigate to Manage Domains and then Modify Domain. On the menu panel on the left we need to click on Transfer DNS to Webhost. You will then see a list of empty boxes numbered 1 to 5 (as shown). We are only interested in boxes 1 and 2 as we only have 2 name servers (the ones we wrote down or copied to the Notebook). Enter the first one in box 1 and the second in box 2. Then click on Save Changes. That is it, we've done! we will now have to wait between 2-12 hours for the DNS to propagate fully. You can check this by typing your new domain name i.e www.yourdomain.com into the address bar in Explorer or Firefox. When it is working correctly you will see a fully functioning temporary website. Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Chapter 6 Introduction to Joomla! I would like to introduce you to your new Best Friend, Joomla! Ever since I have been involved in Web Design and Internet Marketing, I have yet to find another website design software, application or tool that would do the entire "job" of building and managing websites as easy and effective as Joomla! does. When I was first introduced to Joomla! I was literally gobsmacked. When I realized how powerful this website creation tool actually was, it wasn't hard to understand why it has won so many awards. In simple words, Joomla! is one of the most powerful open source content management systems on the planet. No, really! As we will see in this chapter, Joomla! is easy to install and probably even easier to manage. And the best of all, we can use Joomla! to build and manage everything from a simple website to a complex corporate web application. For example, we can use Joomla! to build and manage: Typical direct response "sales-letter" website or "mini-site" for (re)selling single product or service (e.g. info product, software...) E-commerce site or product catalogue website with shopping cart if we're selling multiple products and other types of content focused website if we're publishing lots of Blog fresh content (articles, news, videos) and placing ads (e.g. Google AdSense...) or affiliate links into your content Website with multiple landing pages for your individual pay-per-click advertising campaigns Personal or business blog with commenting system or free membership website where only registered users can access Paid certain areas of your website Community website with forums and users profiles much more... Plus In fact, the only limitation using Joomla! for your online business is your imagination. But you don't need to believe my words. If you've been into Internet Marketing or any other type of online business, I am sure you've at least heard of tools for building your own websites or blogs such as WordPress, Drupal, Blogger or Mambo. Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Chapter 6 Introduction to Joomla! Just out of curiosity, here is what Google Trends is saying when I last compared the popularity of several popular tools for building and managing your own website for free. The graph below shows a trends comparison chart for WordPress, Drupal, Mambo, Blogger and of course, Joomla! As we can see since early 2005, Joomla! (the dark blue line) has hugely gained in popularity and has only real competition from Wordpress, the blogging based website software. To briefly describe the main difference as to why I am showing you Joomla! in this eBook and not Wordpress, is Joomla! is a Content Management System (CMS) and Wordpress is a Blog creating system. Both equally capable and award winning in their own genre. For most businesses the CMS type website platform will suit more businesses than a blogging platform. There are, of course, many other differences and indeed similarities between the two, but is too much to explain here, so please read my eGuide "Joomla! v Wordpress" available in my Membership Site, to see how these two giants compare in a head to head battle. Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Chapter 6 Introduction to Joomla! Before we jump into the meat of this chapter, let me first point out something very important here; Joomla! is FREE in a true meaning of the word "free". Joomla! is an open source software released under General Public License which simply means it is completely free of charge to download and use for both commercial and non-commercial purposes! In simple words, we don't have to pay a penny or a cent to use it for our personal and commercial needs. You may use Joomla!, change it and adapt it to your needs and add any modifications to its code as you want. No only that, we may freely distribute it and may also even charge for that service. The only thing, however, you must not do in any case is to pretend Joomla! is your work. We must not charge people under any circumstances for Joomla! as software itself, because it's free! For example, when I build websites in Joomla! for my clients, I only charge for my service, knowledge, experiences and time. I do not charge for Joomla! software as it has a free licence and cannot be legally sold. Joomla! Is Easy To Understand And Even Easier To Use! If something is too complicated to understand and use, we usually won't use it (unless there is really no other option). Although you probably won't become a Joomla! expert in a day, it sure won't take long for you to realize and understand what Joomla! can do for you and your online business(es), and how much time and money you'll save and gain by using Joomla! for building and managing your own virtual real-estate websites. Well I think that's enough praising of this great software, lets have a look at how it works... Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com
Chapter 7 Installing Joomla! Do you remember your lesson in Chapter 4 when I revealed one of my top secrets? I'm referring to cPanel or Control Panel. I will need to talk about this briefly before we can progress to installing Joomla! Hopefully by now, if you have successfully transferred your Domain Name to Hostgator.com your website should be active. To test this just type: www."yourdomainname".co.uk/cpanel* *Just replace the "yourdomainname" with your new registered domain name. You can then log-in using your username and password supplied in your welcome email. You will then see your new cPanel Accelerated screen. It may look a little confusing at first glance, but we are only interested in one icon at the moment and I think you know which one? The 3rd Top Secret from Chapter 4 called Fantastisco. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen to the tab titled Software/Services and click on the Fantastico De Luxe icon. This is where installing a whole host of website styles just got a lot easier On the left menu we will see a heading called Content Management. First we will need to click on Joomla! 1.5 (the latest version) and the welcome screen will appear. We are only a couple of clicks away from your first live website! Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com