How to Set up your First Website to Generate Leads

Creating and purchasing your Domain Name

This is easy to do and I hope my step by step guide is easy to follow.

The first step is to get yourself a domain name. The domain name is made up of the URL or Uniform Resource Locator. Your domain name should look something like this for example my blog website domain name is www.colettemorris.com

It is important to think about your domain name. Make it short and easy to remember. If you are using your website to promote your business or products, then you may want a name to reflect this.

Reserve a domain name. Make sure no one takes your name! You can check if your domain name is available at GoDaddy.com - Home of the under $9.99 domain name.

Plan the Design and style of the site

Taking time to plan the design look and feel of your website. Planning your website is your most important job! You could do some research and look around at other websites to get some ideas of how they are structured.

Think about the content you want in your website, the order you want the content to be in. Have a range of graphics as well as text. Will you be linking to other sites? These are some of the things to think about. You are the only one who knows what this website needs to say, and what's most important to emphasize.

I would suggest you write down or draw up what you want to say, at least in rough form, and have an idea of what you want your website to look like.

Setting up a Host Service.

In order to set up your own website, you must have room on a specially set up web server where your site will be "hosted". According to 'wikipedia' A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Sites like 'go daddy' will also host your webpage for you, but you need to then build your webpages seperately.

In theory, it's possible to host a website on your own PC, but response time for your visitors will be slower, and you will need to keep your PC on. you will need to learn a lot about running a web server, and you will need to be available to keep it up and running 24 hours a day. For most people, that's just not practical, and web hosting is not very expensive. Here's a great site I use to set up my websites Vodahost

Setting Up Your Pages

Although there are elaborate (and expensive) website creation tools such as Adobe's Dreamweaver, there are less expensive, easier to use software packages that will do just fine for a simple site. Microsoft Frontpage is also another easy to use programme that usually comes with the rest of the microsoft suite. A really great all in one system to help set up your website and landing pages can be found here.  I have included some books from Amazon which may help you set up your pages.

You can also get an experienced web designer to build your site for you. Good places to look for such a person is on www.Elance.com and www.odesk.com