Maybe you are a new online marketer who doesn’t meet my former level of ignorance. I often think, “If I had only known then what I am aware of now.” By “then,” I mean my early year or two in my adventure into the quagmire of Internet business. I could easily fill a large book with significant things that I didn’t know how to do but that I tried, anyway. In truth, I could fill a multi-volume set. It’s a bit embarassing.

Occasionally I try to keep new online marketers from copying my foibles. I identify one or two simple realities of the online business world about which I had been ignorant and that cost me a lot of money, a lot of wasted energy or, usually, both.

My advice for today is this: Every page on a web site is a landing page.

I actually believed that every prospective customer who came to my site would first come to my home page. Those prospects would diligently read every well-crafted word and progress through my site in an orderly fashion, like third graders in line on their way to gym class.

If I had found an expert who would teach me how my prospects would actually discover my site and navigate around it, my sites would have been designed very differently. I guess I should have either hired a consultant or had someone with Internet marketing experience professionally build a business website for me that could have met my expectations much sooner.

My business would have reached a decent level of success much sooner if I had known these things:

* Understand that search engines do not view the Internet as a collection of websites; instead they see a collection of individual pages

* Each individual page on your site and mine should be authored in a way that it contributes to the websites main purpose (sell, obtain leads, whatever)

* Having tracking software that would allow me to diagnose how real people move through my site’s pages

* More quickly discovering that, cumulatively, the interior pages of my website receive more first time visits than my home page

* Recognize that an aesthetically pleasing page is not the same as a productive page

* Learning that spending some money early on can earn a lot more money down the road–and sooner rather than later

I actually love the process of designing the architecture of business websites, now that I actually understand it, so I probably would still not do what I recommend to you: Hire a professional Internet marketer to build yours. Meanwhile, there were plenty of other tasks that I could have had done professionally to allow me more time for my learning.

You have decided that the time has arrived when you need to have an internet prescence for your small business. You are fully aware that the future of advertising and gaining new clients will be internet based. What has worked in previous years such as newspaper advertising may well now be a thing of the past. We all have to move with the times if we are to continue to succeed.

The scary thing for many new webmasters is all of the initial costs of setting up a website. I will never forget just how expensive I thought it was when I had my first website built nearly ten years ago. It was based on the subject of speech therapy for stammering and I was investing in this new site at a time when I did not have a great deal of money. It has however one of the best investments that I have ever made. The website certainly enabled a lot of people to find out about the stuttering therapy service that I offer.

The initial costs of setting up a website include paying for the design, the domain and the web hosting. Then there are the ongoing costs of web promotion; there is of course no point in having a top notch website if nobody ever visits it.

So how can we obtain a web design service for an affordable fee? Just like it is in other forms of business it is not so much what you know but who you know. It is a good idea to ask your friends and colleagues if they know of any professional web designers, especially if these friends or colleagues already have a website. This way you may be able to secure a deal on “mates rates”.

The second way is to speak to freelance web designers as these people usually offer cheaper rates than the web design agencies. Many up and coming web designers start up on their own on a self-employed basis and are normally happy to offer a discount whilst they are building up their portfolio.

Nearly all new businesses have their own web site as it is now considered crucial to success. In fact there are many businesses which exist solely on the Internet. If you have considered starting an online business of your own you may already have discovered how expensive it can be to have a web site built and designed by a professional. The shock may have even given you second thought on starting a business but this article takes a look at the world of web design with a view to building your first web site at little or no cost using free services, software and templates.

You may find it surprising but there are legitimate reasons why professional web site designers charge such high fees. Not only do you have to cover the wages of the highly trained designer but the company has other costs such as office expenses. Even if the web designer works from home he will be using software and hardware, such as Dreamweaver, Photoshop, graphics tablets and the likes, that is really rather expensive. Besides the expensive professional tools there are plenty of cheap or free alternatives well worth considering as most are more than capable of producing the finest web sites.

Finding the cheap or free alternatives is as simple as a search on your favorite search engine. Simply search for “web design freeware” or “web design shareware”, the difference between the two types is that one is free whereas the other requests a small payment for use (especially if the software is being used commercially). You will find a massive selection of web building tools are available and many are so good that some professionals use them!

These days most free web design tools have a WYSIWYG interface which makes web design as easy as drawing a picture. However you will need to learn a little about the programming languages used in web design, HTML & CSS. Even basic knowledge of HTML and CSS will help greatly.

If building a web site from scratch using HTML and CSS is a little daunting then you can search the Internet for free web site templates or free css templates. You will be amazed at the quality of some of these designs which can be easily tweaked to perfectly match your web design requirements.

If even this method is a little too complicated for you there is another alternative which is one of the most popular ways in which to build a web site – blogs. A blog, or weblog, can be about anything or everything and the Internet has millions of blogs covering every topic conceivable.

The really great thing about blogs is that they are free, yes, get that, this amazing web building tool is offered for free! Well not all the time but the most popular, Wordpress and Blogger, are free to use. You are given a small amount of web space to store your posts (pages) and images and the whole process of building a blog is so easy that children do it. The interface is rather like a word processor, you simply type in the text for the page and hit publish and the page is immediately created.

Of course the free blogs are rather basic with some limitations but as your knowledge increases you can upgrade some to include extra facilities and more web space. However it is really not that complicated to change the design of your blog and, if you have downloaded the blog software (Wordpress is best) to install on your own free web space (very easy to install) then you can take advantage of the many free Wordpress themes and templates available.

Remember building your first web site can be as easy as searching for freeware, shareware, free web templates etc. So why don’t you head on over to your favorite search engine and get started on your very first web site just now? Take a Look at www.freewebsitetemplates4u.com