Best Website Format for Making Money Online
If you’re interested in making money online, you’ll need to decide which website format you will be using. When I say “format,” I mean which software platform, or language, will you be creating your website with?
For starters, it’s helpful to know basic HTML. It’s not completely necessary, but having a basic understanding of HTML will make your life so much easier when building your site.
I’ve been making websites for years, so I have a very thorough understanding of HTML. I also have an understanding of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which is the standard for giving your web pages proper formatting. If you’re serious about starting your own website, I strongly recommend spending a few hours (at least) getting to know the basics of HTML and CSS.
I’ll recommend 3 websites for learning HTML and CSS. Each of the following has step by step tutorials:
With that being said, it is possible to create a website with no HTML or CSS knowledge at all. As a matter of fact, the page you are reading now was created without typing one bit of HTML or CSS code. Even though I have a thorough understanding of these programming techniques, I would prefer not to have to type the actual code if I don’t have to.
So how do you make a website without knowing code? There are a few ways, but I strongly recommend using Wordpress. Wordpress is a blogging platform which is available free for anyone to use. Actually, you can go to www.wordpress.com and set up your own blog right now. You don’t even need to buy a domain name or pay for web hosting. Anyone can start a Wordpress blog, or numerous Wordpress blogs, without ever paying a penny.
However, for your money-making site, you will want to buy your own domain name and web-hosting service. The free blogs are hosted at the Wordpress domain, and you don’t have nearly as much control or as many options as you do on your own domain. See my previous articles on purchasing a domain name and choosing the best web hosting service.
But if you’re looking to experiment, go open a Wordpress account and start a blog just for kicks.
Again, if you’re looking for the easiest, quickest way to get a website up and running with the power to optimize and modify your site to fit exactly what your needs are, Wordpress is the best. Even though I know how to create my own site from scratch, I’ll probably never do that again. I’m hooked on Wordpress.
Wordpress is fully customizable with hundreds, or thousands, of free themes, and can be extended with thousands of “plugins.” You can make your Wordpress blog as plain, or as fancy, as you want. Your blog can be a single page, or contain thousands of pages. When you add basic HTML and CSS skills to the mix, your Wordpress blog can be compared to any professionally designed website on the internet.
Wordpress blogs can be monetized with ease. That’s right… to make money (monetize) your blog, all you need to do is install a few plugins, copy and paste some basic code, and your blog has the potential to make money immediately.
Even more importantly, if you want to make money from your website, you need to let the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) know that your website is there, and let them know when you have new content to be indexed. By design, Wordpress is ideal for getting your site broadcast over the web.
With each of my Wordpress blogs, my sites have been listed in the search engines within 2 or 3 days after launch. This site, InternetMarketingLegacy.com, has only been online for about a week, and it’s fully indexed with the major search engines. And the search engine spiders are coming back every day to check for new content. That’s fast!
After hours upon hours of research for the best Wordpress plugins, I’ve come up with about a dozen that I absolutely can not, and will not, build a blog without. I’m putting that list together in a free report which I’ll be mailing out to my subscribers as soon as I have it ready. If you haven’t subscribed to my site yet, you can sign up on the right side of this page.
I know… there will be people who read this article and say that other platforms are easier to work with than Wordpress. I’ve tried other platforms, such as Blogger (and others), and I’ve settled on Wordpress as my platform of choice.
So how do you install Wordpress on your own website? I’m saving that for my next article. Stay tuned…
September 19th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
I wish you could answer a question for me. I have hardly any technical skills and I am trying to learn but I still can’t figure out how to add articles to a website.
My question is, if I get a hosted Wordpress or Blogger can you add articles just as easily as to a blog or is it as complicated as adding them to a website?
I am already having to cancel 3 of my websites because I can’t figure out how to add anything to them.
Thanks
September 19th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Marilyn,
Adding article to a Wordpress blog is extremely easy. With a wordpress blog, you have an admin screen which allows you to have complete control over the site. You can add posts (articles), install plugins, manage comments, and much more. Seriously, Wordpress is a breeze to work with once you understand the basics.
This website is a wordpress blog installed with cpanel. I’m going to write an article in the next day or so about how to set up a blog with cpanel.
After that, I’ll be sending out an email to all of my subscribers with a list of the essential plugins every wordpress blog should have.
I hope that helps.
The Internet Marketer