starting an Internet based business
On the last couple of pages I have hopefully made you realize that starting an Internet based business is the best way to work from home these days – certainly if you want to be self employed and enjoy all the time freedom, tax breaks and job satisfaction this root brings.
So, assuming you now know what it is you’d like to build a home based business website around, (if not, see here) what is it you actually need? First and foremost, you’ll need some software to build a website with. Do a search at your favorite search engine (such as Google) for “free wysiwyg web page editor”. Don’t worry about the jargon “wysiwyg”, as this is simply an acronym for “what you see is what you get”. It means the software you build your website with is easy to use. By using this type of web page editor you won’t have to worry about learning html (the language browsers read). By using a wysiwyg editor your webpage building is much simpler. My advice is find a free one you like and start getting used to it by playing around and reading the start-up help files. If you would rather pay for one you can buy them from any good computer shop.
Next we need somewhere to put our website (a web host) so that it is accessible to the world through the Internet. Again we are able to do this for free. Do another search engine search for “free web space” and you’ll find a wide selection. Chose one you feel you’d like to work with but its important the service does not feed any advertisements through your web pages. Search for “free web space no ads”.
You will need a domain name (e.g. www.yourname.com). This is so that your site looks professional. You will have to pay money for this but it should only cost you a few dollars. You may decide it is easier for you to buy it at the same time as you set up your webspace (i.e. through your web host). If not you will be instructed what to do to bring the two together when you purchase the domain name.
One last piece of free downloadable software you’ll need is a tool to upload your web pages from your computer to your web hosts server. Again, don’t be scared by the jargon, but what you need is “FTP”. This is an acronym for “File Transfer Protocol”, and it’s very simple to use. All it does is downloads and uploads files. That’s it. All website hosting services will be compatible with standard ftp software. Do another search, this time for “free ftp”. This should give you a wide choice of free ftp clients to work with.