Part Time Webmaster Blog

This evening, I sat with family thinking about the blog. I wondered if I was going in the right direction. Who is this blog for anyway? Me, you. Is it for me to make money? Well, yes and no. Or, is it a site for me to express my thoughts, share my knowledge? Anyway, I figured I have gotten a little off track and figured I’d start all over again.

I’m a programmer by trade, when I first started consulting all of my clients were through large consulting companies. And, these clients all knew what they wanted. They wanted a website. So, that was our mission and we built a lot of them, still do. But, what if it’s just you, you’re not a big company with a lot of money, you’d like a website, what do you do, the little guy? Well, this post is for you. So, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a small or large company, or an individual, this next set of posts will help answer any question you may have.

First question, “Why do you want a website?” This is a big question. So, if you’re just starting out, or, you’re familiar with everything, let’s analyze why we want a website.

What is your goal? Here are a couple of questions to get started down the right path for your presence on the internet.

1. Do you own a company?
2. Do you sell products?
3. Do you sell services?
4. Do you have a full time job?
5. Do you want to make money online?
6. Do you want to keep in touch with family?
7. How much money are you willing to spend?
8. Do you have an idea to make millions?
9. How much time are you willing to invest?
10. Do you like to do everything yourself, or do you want someone to do it for you?
11. Are you technical? Are you a programmer?

If you’ve put some thoughts into those, you probably have more questions. So, again, do you want a website? Or, do you think is something else online already that will suit your needs? For example, could MySpace or Facebook solve all of your problems? If you own a company it doesn’t matter, eventually, you will need a website, but, you don’t need one right away.

In either case, if you want to present yourself on the web, there are a few basic steps you’ll need to take. In this post, we’ll just start with the basics.

Step 1: Get an email address
I know it’s simple, but before you do anything on the internet these days, you will need an email address. You don’t need a special one yet with your company name. But, to register for website addresses (domain names) you’ll need one.

So, if you don’t have an email address yet, sign up for a free one on one of the most common search engines. Whatever you do, do not sign up with your internet provider and use that one as your main email address. Why? Well, what happens to those that choose an email address based on their cable provider? When they switch, they have to tell everyone the new email address. So, stick to the basic email providers so you can have the email address for years to come.

Here are a couple of the most popular:

1. Google: Google by far is my favorite. To sign up for a Google email address, click here.
2. Yahoo: Yahoo is pretty popular as well. To sign up for a Yahoo email address, click here.
3. Microsoft (Hotmail) – Microsoft will be here for a while as well. Click here to get a Hotmail email address.

Now, that we have an email address, let’s go onto the next step. See the next blog titled “Can I survive without a website?”