Online business startup plan. The smart and easy approach.

Site building process is nowadays less and less being led by tech savvies but by the people with creative approach and willingness to embody unique ideas and services. So I’ve started this project to illustrate how easy the whole site-building process is and highlighted some obvious and not-so-obvious problems and tasks you’ll face while setting up your on-line presence.

My idea is to create an educational site with tutorials about site building for those who would like to have online presence. My goal is to describe the easiest ways to do that thus the site will be made with the help of a premade template.

Thinking of the best way to demonstrate all the step-by-step instructions I’ve come up with an idea of just creating a real site devoted to different ways of site-building. I’ve commented all my steps, so you can actually follow the recipe while watching me cooking the pie.

In general any site creation consists of the following steps and does look like a usual brick-and-mortar business startup plan:

1. Come up with an idea
2. Think of the site’s content
3. Compose the content
4. Pick up a domain name
5. Find a hosting provider
6. Create a web design
7. Install the CMS
8. Fill the site with content
9. Promote the resource

Unique Idea Generation

The idea of your site in most cases would coincide with your site’s goal and the main reason of your project. Avoid general purposes however like “I need to earn extra money” or “I want a website” as those won’t do you any good and will be just waste of time and cash.

My site’s idea about web building tutorials is not that unique, but I do have a unique approach to the whole deal and treat it more like a challenge to your creativity but not HTML/PHP knowledge. Internet does lack sites created by common people.

Site’s content

Why would anyone visit your website? Why would people stay or come back to your site. Evaluate the whole project with your visitor’s eyes.

My targeted visitor is a person who’s willing to take advantage of the on-line world to serve any needs of community. Internet is indeed a great tool to make the reality better. Your site can be a great place for ideas sharing, project management, a 24/7 open door of your shop, your local club virtual representative…

Compose the content

Your first site should really be about what you really enjoy doing or learning about, so you the whole process of info gathering would be joyful. Look at what’s been done by other site owners and use their experience to avoid reinventing the wheel. Exploring the niche is something that would really help you to find link partners. If your goal is to build site about something you don’t have a clue, do a research and find experts in this field to help you out.

I am going to write all my tutorials by myself referring to my experience as well as eternal principles of marketing and site building.

Domain Name

2 things you might want to take into consideration while choosing a name for your site. It should be a breeze to remember and contain your targeted keyword. But it’s up to you. You can make up a word and by means of aggressive brand building get tremendous publicity.

I went the easy way. Put together 2 keywords my site would be all about and got Templatedbusiness.com Finding the name you really want might be quite a challenging task for the right side of your brain as you’ll be surprised how many words have already been taken. To check the availability, go to www.checkdomain.com

Hosting provider

To choose the best available hosting package you are to know at least approximately how big and popular your project will be. Mine will be relatively small and traffic will be below 100 kilos/mo this year so personal hosting for $5.95 is just fine.

Create a web design

I’ve come up with 6 pages that would have everything needed for my project

1. Home
2. Website templates
3. TemplateTuning
4. Affiliate Program
5. Link to Us
6. Contact Us

Let’s start with the home page. I’ve its space into 10 main blocks:

1. Header banner
2. Main Horizontal Menu
   • - Home
   • - Website Templates
   • - Templatetuning
   • - Affiliate Program
   • - Link to us
   • -Contact us
3. Menu in the left column
4. Templates Section
5. Content of the main page is completely editable from the admin panel
6. Newsletter form subscription
7. Featured Partners Section
8. Affiliates Section
9. Banners Section
10. Partners Section in the footer

Here’s a diagrammatic plan:

Template Tuning Page

The page will contain all the information about template.tuning services.

Affiliate Sign-Up Page

This page will have a standard affiliate sign-up page.

Link to Us

Here you’ll find our banners so you can refer to the site.

Contact US

A usual contact form.

Then I went to templatemonster.com and found the template that would correspond to all my requirements.

Install the CMS

Thinking of the right Content Management for my site I’ve chosen Joomla as it’s free and easy to learn. I found a few useful tutorials on how to work with Joomla here http://info.template-help.com/after_sale_support/Demo_movies_database/Joomla/article1.html.

After I’ve uploaded the files via FTP to my server I’ve made a list of all changes that are to be applied to the template. I didn’t risk my time and efforts to do all the customization myself and just made an order at templatetuning.com. Here you can see what’s been asked and what’s been done:

1. Draw a Newsletter Section

2. Add a Partner’s Section

3. Install affiliate shop from www.templatemonster.com. Here you can find more detailed info on how to create one.

4. Cread and upload banner for the affiliate programs of www.mytemplatestorage.com and www.templatetuning.com

5. Make footer for the site.

6. Put a banner in the header.

7. Create secondary pages (Website Templates, TemplateTuning, Affiliate Program, Link to Us, Contact Us)

The whole template customization cost me $243

Fill the site with content

As a result I got a fully working site that is to be filled with the content and this is my first article so far. I plan to update my resource regularly and highlight the the most effective site building trends.

Promote the resource

I read a few article on search engine optimization at http://www.webdesign.org/web/site-maintenance/web-promotion/ and got a bit confused by the number of tips, tricks and things I am to take onto consideration so I’ve just ordered a STANDARD SEO Package from webdesign.org marketing team to save up some time for doing what I really enjoy. It cost me only $300 as I used a %50 discount code from templatemonster.com Money spent on SEO was returned within 2 months as it did attract audience highly interested in smart website building. I’ve also succeeded to arrange some profitable agreements with advertisers.

Overall I’ve spent only $646 for my on-line business startup.

UPD: While browsing the internet and studying the new ways of building the sites I ran across an offer from http://www.site2you.com/ and that’s sure to be a revolution in the whole site building industry. For $49.95 month fee you get a ready-made site and the whole process of getting a site would consist of 1 step – just get it! I’ve played around with a free account and really loved it. My next project will be sure created with this service and I’ll highlight my experience here.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 5:43 AM and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.