Recommended by David

The Traditional Approach

When you are in  the early days of building an internet based business, one of the most challenging parts of the learning curve is putting up your first website. You can, of course, pay an expert to build one for you, but it’s a fair assumption that in the early days most people will want to save themselves that cost. The challenge is so large because there are so many different new concepts and components to it. You need answers to all of the following:

• what “web design” software should I use?
• how do I use it? (a very steep part of the learning curve)
• what features do I want my website to have?
• what is it going to be about?
• what will it sell?
• what do I want it to look like?
• how do I upload it to the web?
• how do I maintain it?

The usual approach is to invest time and money into Frontpage, Dreamweaver or other such software and build up your knowledge and skills from scratch. If you wish, you can save yourself time on developing the “look and feel” of your site by investing in templates and using one of those. Even if you do, though, you still need to develop your own skills so that you can manipulate the template to produce your own, intended result.

One of the biggest obstacles to setting up a website this way, is the perception that you need to understand a “web language” before you can do it. Anyone looking at an internet business from scratch is likely to have come across the term “html” and see it as a foreign language. Learning a foreign language at school brings to my mind spending a minimum of 2 years to get to any level of proficiency. That association of “html” with “learning a new language” and a 2 year timescale creates a potential insurmountable obstacle for anyone wishing to set up a new business.

A New Way

Let’s just forget about creating a website for a moment. Let’s turn our thoughts to another area of the internet that has seen phenomenal growth in recent years: that of blogging. It seems that many people have this innate compulsion to write on the internet. People who find it difficult to find the time to write letters to friends are finding it much easier to share their innermost thoughts on almost any topic with the rest of the world. (I have to plead guilty at this point).

Now I don’t really want to get into the psychology of why this should be, but what is interesting for the purposes of this article, is the perception of the technology behind the blog. Why aren’t budding bloggers put off by the technical issues? How come that the “technical” side of having a blog is rarely mentioned as a problem, and yet the “technical” side of having a website is?

Surely the answer has to lie in the software. Blogging software is pretty much designed for the purpose of people using it to write and post to the web easily. Many of the technological issues are already addressed by the software. Bloggers mainly have to concern themselves with the content of the next blog post. Not so with building a website the traditional way, you have all those other issues that we mentioned earlier.

But hang on a minute! Surely a blog is only a website? Of course, it is. And surely it doesn’t HAVE to be used as a web “diary”? What’s stopping it being used as a “normal” website?

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

So, for an easy way to build a website, use blogging software. Of course, there will still be a learning curve but you won’t find it as steep as the traditional way. CLICK HERE for the best free learning resource I know as an introduction to blogging. Enjoy!

David

PS My grateful thanks to Debra Thompson Roedl, whose presentation at the World Internet Summit, London 2008, provided the inspiration for this article.

PPS New to my blog? Don’t forget to claim your 20 free QUALITY ebooks. CLICK HERE to find out more.