When resources are scarce it’s important to maximize results and
stretch every dollar. As home business entrepreneurs, we don’t
have the ad budgets of Coca-Cola and Disney, we can’t afford to
throw money away.
There are a number of free resources that make building and
promoting your website a whole lot easier.
Web Site Design - page layout (http://www.steves-templates.com)
Steve provides free web page templates which are nice looking,
professional and can be used free for personal and business
websites. Check out all the variations and pick a template for
your site. Another way to use this is as a springboard for your
own creativity. Perhaps you like an element on template 1 and
the navigation of template 7. Get some ideas for creating your
own site from scratch. There are also designs you can buy for
under $100 and you gain access to a number of images, clipart,
sounds, fonts etc.
Web Site Design - graphics (http://www.cooltext.com) Cool Text
is a wonderful tool for creating great looking buttons and
logos. It’s free and the combinations of
shape/color/texture/font are virtually endless. You can create
professional buttons and logos with just a few mouse clicks. I
use this site any time I want to “freshen up” my site or create
buttons/logos for my customers.
Web Site Performance - images (http://www.gifworks.com) Nothing
slows down your page like heavy graphics. Did you know that you
can dramatically reduce the file size of your graphics without
compromising the look and feel of your site? That’s where
gifworks.com comes in. Run their free “optimization” tool on
your gif images and watch as they get more and more streamlined.
Your web pages will load faster. Gifworks has a paid service as
well, allowing you to buy images, get custom work, etc.
Web Site Performance - code (http://validator.w3.org/) Is your
website correctly coded? This free validator from the W3
examines your html and reports missing tags, missing attributes
and other errors that make your code non-standard and therefore
difficult for some web browsers to serve up. With line-by-line
validation, you can easily find the places in your code that
will cause errors. I love this validator, it makes sure my pages
work across all browsers and platforms. No more trying pages in
every browser/OS configuration. When it validates here, you can
be sure that it’s up to W3 standards.
Web Site Promotion - blogging (http://www.blogger.com) Blogger
is Google’s blogging tool. It’s free, easy to set up, and gets
your site indexed by search engines (all of them, not just
Google) faster than you can believe. If you want to increase
your search engine positioning, forget all that SEO stuff, start
blogging today. In a world where “Content is King!”, a blog
provides you a platform to provide constantly changing,
completely interesting and relevant content to your web
visitors. It gives them a reason to come back, you form a
relationship with them by providing good quality information,
and you increase your conversion rate, resulting in more
subscribers and more sales.
Web Site Promotion - marketing (http://www.articlemarketer.com)
I’m not the first person to tell you that article marketing is
the number one method of driving targeted traffic to your
website. Writing articles for others to publish is free
advertising and you should do as much of it as you can. The
problem is the dreadfully tedious process of article submission.
Article Marketer took that off my plate. Their free service
sends articles to over 2000 people to be published in ezines and
newsletters, and they have a paid version that gets to over
50,000 people. It works - after all, you’re reading this
article, aren’t you?
These tools are free for the asking. You can’t beat the price,
and your results will skyrocket as you improve the look and feel
of your website and spread the word about your business.