Building Websites

Squarespace is a CMS platform that allows bloggers and webmasters to create their own place on the web. You can sign up for a free 14 day trial and then pay from $7 - $175/month by using their services.

Creating a site is easy and takes all but two minutes to get launched. See the next few images for the initial process of site creation.

Did you know that Squidoo is a great platform to build your own blog totally free of charge? The Squidoo blogs are actually called lenses and they can resemble anything you dream off. I have personally built about a dozen lenses and I use them for affiliate marketing.

How to get the luscious into Squidoo
Given enough thought, detail and promotion, these lenses can actually be very rewarding in terms of earning some extra money. The hardest part would be to decide on how you want to build your lens. For the purpose of being successful and actually selling stuff from them, you will need to take a step back and look at what you are knowledgeable about.

The reason being is that you will need to write some related information in your lens and the more you are comfortable with the topic at hand, the better the lens will be. Alternatively if you are good at research, you can also create a lens in no time and use it to sell affiliate products from.

Finally, today we’re going to cover our third and final type of site in the Different Types of Website Series. The first type was a mini site. The second was a blog.

What are content sites?

Put simply, a content site is a site filled with … you got it … content. Normally, this content would be in the form of informational articles. But content these days, spans across other forms of media as well. There are content sites filled with entertaining videos (think YouTube), audio interviews, how-to screencasts, image collection (as in Flickr).

Pretty much anything.

Although you can create one website about anything and everything, it’s better practice to specialize in a certain niche. So, you could build a site about beds and have articles about beds, videos on how to choose the right bed, images of different types of beds … If you absolutely need to write about chairs as well, you could easily just start a separate site about chairs.

I’ve recently completed writing a “how to” on uploading files to your web host server. I published it on Hubpages.com to test their system. Come check it out.

You’ve grabbed a set of web site building tools and made your own website. Now, all that’s left to do is to upload your website and other related files to your web host’s server. A lot of newbies find this difficult but it really isn’t.

Click here to read the rest of the tutorial article.

Now we’re on to our second website type in the Different Types of Website Series. The first type was a mini site. Today, we’re moving on to blogs.

What are blogs?

In the past few years, blogs have evolved so much that I’m actually finding it hard to define what it really is. Also known as weblogs, blogs may be hard to describe but easy to recognize. A blog can be recognized by the way its content is organized. You will notice that new content are displayed at the top. So, as new content is added the old ones will move down. Very much like what you see on the WebBriefcase’s blog homepage.

Photo credit: Santiago Cornejo

This is the first website type in the Different Types of Website Series.

What are mini sites?

A mini site is simply a one- to three-page website. Maybe 5 pages at most. Actually, technically, a one page website would be more of a micro site but for the sake of practicality, I’m going to include it as a mini site. The tools you need to create both are pretty much the same.

Many newbies get confused about the different types of websites that they can make. In fact, most don’t even know there are different types of websites. Here’s a question that I often get from my subscribers.

What is the difference between a website, minisite and blog. What are their advantages/disadvantages.As a beginner what would you recommend I start off with?

Today, I’m just going to cover briefly on what type of sites are available out there and in the next few days I’ll go through the whats and whys of the more popular types.

Anybody who knows me knows that “simple” and “fluff free” is my mantra. I preach simplicity any opportunity I get. Why have 3 columns on your webpage when you can have 2 and why 2 when 1 will do the job. I was surfing today and found these posts of …

I’ve been meaning to write up about Squidoo. In fact, I checked my account and realized that I signed up ages ago. And never quite found the time to create a lens (that’s what Squidoo calls its webpages).

Anyway, yesterday I decided to buckle down …

I’m a strong supporter of using web site templates to create web sites. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I actually designed my own sites. It just takes way too much time. With so many website template repositories on the net today, there are more than enough choices to pick from.

Although I’m not a professional web designer, I do have above average web design skills. So, buying a template and customizing it for my needs is quite an easy task. But what if you’re a complete beginner? With no technical experience whatsoever. Is it as easy?

Well, it depends.

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