Setting Up a Website

If you want to publicize your company, yourself, your hobby or your organization, you can set up a website for very little money.

There are a number of web hosting companies now that allow you to create your website using templates and WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editors. Although the design will not be original, it will be professional looking, and you'll be able to customize it with your own logo, text and graphics.

Here are some good companies that cater to do-it-yourselfers:

• Starting at about $7 a month, Yahoo registers a URL (eg. yoursite.com) for you and provides an excellent page building tool as part of the package.
• . This company has really good service and support.
• Intuit Websites has been in the do-it-yourself website business for several years. They offer a free 30 day trial.
• TeacherWeb®
  Designed especially for teachers, this company lets you post announcements, homework assignments, calendar and test grades on a preformatted site. Starts at $3 per month
• Protopage If you just want one personal page, there's a quirky, free site called Protopage that lets you build a page and add your own widgets. Very cute.

If you have a way of collecting emails offline — for example, a signup box in your shop or restaurant, or a signup sheet at your club's meetings — you may wish to use email to communicate. Email newsletters can be used either by themselves or as an adjunct to your website. There are many good programs out there to enable you to send attractively formatted emails to hundreds or thousands of people. Most of these services charge by the size of your email list. For example, . They start at $15 a month and offer a discount for nonprofits.

If you have a more specific communications need, such as simple online invoicing, try Blinksale. They offer a 30 day free trial.

You will need three or four elements for your online store:

• A "catalog" where you list your products
• A "shopping cart" where you show people what they've ordered
• A secure socket connection (SSL) (not necessary for certain payment processors like basic PayPal)
• A payment process, where you collect their money.
  

The easiest, cheapest and fastest way to collect money is through PayPal 's basic (no upfront fees) service. Once you open an account with them, you can click on their merchant tools and they will step you through building a button that will enable visitors to your site to pay for single items or subscriptions. They even supply a simple shopping cart.

Many of the same companies that offer informational websites offer do-it-yourself eCommerce websites that provide design templates, shopping carts and relationships with payment processors. Warning: You will need to invest a fair amount of time in entering each of your products into their forms.

Here are some good ecommerce hosting companies:

• Yahoo has both a basic store and more complex stores with coupons, shipping and backend integration. They start at $30 a month.
• ProStores - an eBay Company They also start at $30 a month.
• have different offerings, starting at $9.95 for using PayPal, up to $59.95 for a complete eCommerce solution.

Here's a software package that you can buy and have installed on your own website

• PDG Commerce comes with a 30 day free trial and good support.

If you feel competent to learn as you go, you can get a regular web hosting account, such as Super Green Hosting or IM Hosted Website Hosting , that offers shopping carts you can integrate with your website for a lower monthly fee.

And here are some credit card merchant processing companies if you decide to go for regular hosting with a shopping cart included:

• credit card processing - guaranteed lowest prices on merchant accounts and credit card processing equipment
• Capital Merchant Solutions, No setup fees. Lower %age charge than PayPal, but they have a monthly minimum.

A blog (short for web log) is like an online journal. You share your thoughts, ideas, political views, philosophy and personal feelings on the web in an easy to use tool. Many blogs let your readers respond to what you've written.

Here are some free and inexpensive blog hosts:

• Diaryland looks like it's designed for youngsters, but the look of your blog is customizable. They offer a free blog, with a small yearly fee if you want advanced features like posting pictures and getting reader responses.
• blogger.com is now owned by Google. It's a little harder to use than diaryland.

There are tools that let you build calendars and integrate them into your website. Coffee Cup Web-Calendar is $34 and lets you add events and descriptions, then upload them to your website, no HTML required. If you prefer, you can use an online service like EZWebcalendar, which doesn't require you to download software. They charge a small monthly fee.

Photo developers like Photoworks.com have had to adjust to the digital revolution. Instead of developing rolls of film, they have now become repositories of digital photos. You store your photos for free on their sites and they hope to sell you prints, albums, mugs, coasters and other merchandise. Most allow you to organize your photos into albums and slide shows for easier viewing and sharing. Camera manufacturers like HP have also gotten into the act.

Here are some photo hosts:

• Photoworks.com Prints are a few cents each.

If you want to present a professional looking photo gallery, there are tools that will enable you to do that. For example, Coffee Cup Photo Gallery is a simple to use, inexpensive tool that generates an attractive, customizable gallery that you can post to your own website (upload tool included).