Posts tagged Less

What if you could make a simple website with a decent offer on it and earn a little money for doing it? Maybe you think it’s too difficult? A lot of prospective Internet Marketers find themselves wishing they had a site, but not being able to do anything about it.

I don’t know why it’s such a formidable barrier. But that’s because I can do it. Easily.

Still, I couldn’t do a bit of it last year.

How did I do it? I simply made the decision to do it.

I had been studying Internet Marketing for a while and the whole time I was looking into it I was avoiding the website thing. It seemed too complicated!  Too technical. They talk in code!

I remember the day well. It was a beautiful early summer day and I was in my van down by the river. No I wasn’t living in it.

I had my two dogs with me, a box lunch, and dog treats. I was also fortunate to have my laptop and a high speed wireless antenna set up in my van!

I had everything I needed that day, except the ability to build a webpage, no matter how simple.

I had a nice lunch, watched people floating by on inner tubes, and played with the dachshunds a bit…meanwhile building up my determination.

We returned to the van and I positioned my little computer table and went online.

I wasn’t intimidated anymore, I was just going to do it.

I’d been told about the FREE webpage building software, and where to find it.

So I found it online and downloaded it onto my trusty laptop.

It’s actually free software that has been in development for years by this group of people so altruistic that they are willing to work there for FREE!

So, there it was, right in front of me. Nothing could stop me.

It took a while to boot, so it must be a big program, but soon there was a blank document with a tips box that I read and clicked off. I was good to go.

As it turned out, HTML editing isn’t intimidating. It looks like a word processor. But you’re making a webpage!

I had close by a special tutorial that I had printed out. It looked a lot easier to follow than the online instructions, and it turns out it was!

I started by saving the file as “firstattemptatwebsite” so I would know what it was.

Right here I’d like to remind everybody to save often, so that, in case the unspeakable happens, you won’t lose everything!

Second thing was, I had to look at the top of the blank document for a bit and notice all the little icons across the top. 

No problem. Some of the icons were familiar but most of them were foreign to me. I wasn’t going to let that bother me.

I moved the mouse arrow up to the “Table” icon. A box appeared on my formerly blank document, a little one. It had those little grab handles so I latched on and made a big box!

This is progress! I had a big, empty box! I moved the arrow up to the little icons for rendering text to be right, center, left, or fill space. I picked “center”. Voila!  The box was centered.

I decided to save this now because I didn’t want anything bad to happen and this was, after all, my first webpage! 

I chose to make the box light blue. Wow. There is a blinking cursor in the box where you can type in text. Wow, now I’m on text! What next?

I typed in “My First Webpage”. It was on the left, vertically centered, and it was a tiny font. That would not do.

I “selected” that text and moved my mouse arrow up to the icons I had just used and chose “center”. Nothing happened! I couldn’t believe it…something has gone wrong already!

The dogs are staring at me.

Total elapsed time from start to here, about 5 minutes. They don’t need to go out yet.

I consult my tutorial. Aha! I move the arrow up to the table icon and it’s menu appears.

It has two tabs. One for tables and one for cells. What’s a cell?

Anyway, in the “cell” box I find that I can move the selected text to center top and there it was, at the top in the center. I’ve come a long ways.

Not one to rest on past achievements I move my arrow to the upper right to “Headings”. I thought it would be better named “Headlines” but I don’t work at that free software outfit.

I select Heading 1.  My text gets big!  It’s a headline! 

It’s black though and I want to change it to red even if I’m not at that part of the tutorial yet. So I do. It gets red. This is easy!

But something’s bothering me. The text is at top center all right but they are too close to the top. It looks cramped. So I go back up to the “table” pulldown and I discover “padding”.

Padding? That’s the distance between the table border and it’s contents. It is set at 2 pixels. Way too close!

I change it to 10. Bam! Sure enough, the text moved down and looked better. I have a webpage!  Sure it’s not fancy, but if it’s this easy so far it might stay easy all along.

I’m a webmaster!Not a big time webmaster, but I was on my way.

But it’s not up on the web!  Oooh, FTP…I start to re-feel the intimidation vibes. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. Phew!

Thinking ahead I have already looked into FTP, found a great FREE FTP software and have it installed.

Another thing I have done in advance is purchase a domain and hosting package! They make it so easy.

So save my first HTML webpage file and I fire up the FREE FTP.  I’m growing comfortable with all these foreign terms.

I am preparing to upload and publish! More new terminology.

I had to go to my host and get my secret code words for my website, so that my FTP software can claim it represents me and none other, and be allowed access. More new things.

My new FTP software is waiting. I tell it which file I want uploaded to my host’s servers. In the pulldown menu I select “upload” and “choose file”.

In “choose file” I select “firstattemptatwebpage.html” that I had saved to my desktop and click upload.  About four seconds later it’s done and declared “successfully uploaded”. Man!

I have come so far in the last half an hour that it just blows me away!  I’m excited. But now…the real test…is my webpage on the web with hungry hoards looking at it?

As it turns out…no hoards. I’m the only person that knows it’s there right now. I left it exactly the same from then on. But it gets traffic. I put a counter on it.

Let’s go there. Ok. My FTP software has the address!

I click on it. My first website comes up on the web!

It has an address. 

Actually it’s a URL. Uniform Resource Locator. Who knew? My first website! Well, webpage.

I’m literally overwhelmed with the potential of this. I see sales pages and my business account going up for once.

Yes, it’s just stupid simple but it’s incredible, really. Not the webpage, just that it works!

The whole thing took about 30 minutes. At this time I could do it in 5, including change or correct text, etc. Typos happen!

I’m a webmaster. It feels good.

If you need to be able to build webpages, just start.

I was capable of making money online after that day by the river. I have webpages now that are more complicated but the basics stay the same.

It was easy and I was intimidated by it. That’s human nature I guess.

To recap… get a domain name and hosting. Buy the cheapest one…you’re a beginner, after all.

Then type into search “Free webpage software” There’s plenty!

Then type into search “Free FTP software”..same thing, plenty.

Next, make your simple webpage and upload it!  You’re in business. Welcome!

The only thing with an actual cost is Domain (URL) and Hosting, and it’s very reasonable. Mine is ten bucks a month.

So, go for it folks, there is very little standing between you and you being able to put a webpage (salespage?) on the web.

Just take it one or two steps at a time and, soon, you’ll be able to do business online!