How to Build a Website
for a Successful Online Business

These days, anyone can build a website. Our local college even offers a course on how to build a website in a weekend.

And that's fine, provided you just want to build a website to see how it looks, or to keep in touch with friends and family.

If you want your website to earn money, or promote your existing business, though, most of these courses fall flat.

They fall flat because they merely focus on the mechanics of how to build a website and ignore the BUSINESS aspects of it.

So this is what we'll focus on here: how to build a website for fun and profit, to promote a business and earn income. And, as usual, we'll do it in stages:

Design Tips

Have you found a great template for your business website and can't wait to customise it to make it truly yours? Before you go all out with colours, special effects and amazing fonts, think about your customers and what kind of experience you want them to have when they visit your business site. read the website design tips collected here.

Website Building Tools

A discussion of topics I get asked about a lot. Should you have a blog or a website? Should you have a blog AND a website? What's the best HTML editor out there? What graphics tools should you consider? How can I get the most from my content management system? And lots of other questions like it.

SEO

Don't run away screaming - SEO is not that difficult. In fact, you just need to develop a few good habits - like those covered in the 5 Minute SEO series - and stick to them to outrank the majority of websites. But SEO can take your business even further than that - and this series of articles tells you how.

Content Development

Business on the internet is not all about selling. It's about pre-selling: attracting customers and building trust by providing quality content. If you want to learn how to build a website that generates income and attracts customers, learning to pre-sell effectively is time well spent.

Learn HTML Basics

With most of today's content management systems, you need very few HTML skills to build a site. Still, sometimes it helps if you understand why something works the way it does - even if it's just to re-position an image on a page, add a headline or make the margins wider so the page looks smarter. The tips listed here are really just HTML basics, but they'll get you closer to where you need to be.

Find out more...