Build Your Own Website Tools

I've had many ideas of different business to get into. Upon researching and pursuing those ideas, I've had some experience building websites and learning fun ways of advertising. Unlike many other people, I don't want to offer cheap products and services. I'm more into quality merchandise for a fair price. Therefore, I feel an valuable way to advertise and sell products are by building a website. Auctions are cool, but you most likely won't sell anything for the price you really want to sell it for.

In researching website building tools, I've come across a few. The first one I tried was through Earthlink. This was several years ago and I didn't sell merchandise on the site. It was a site that I built for family and friends to view pictures of my baby. Being that it was the first site I tried to built, I was unexperienced and a lot of the tools were too confusing to use. I built a basic site, but it was pretty nice. Earthlink offered real cool tools. The problem that I had was that it was hard to understand how to use them. I was in college at the time working towards a degree in Information Technology, it really shouldn't have been that confusing for me. I gave it a couple of weeks and then got bored with it. I couldn't figure out any real fun things to do with it.

Recently, I did another search for website builders and found that many of them charge monthly fees and activation fees. I'm not sure how this business will turn out so I really don't want to commit to anything right now. So the first one I tried was homepagenow.com. This isn't really a website builder. I was rather disappointed by the results. It was a basic template where you could post pictures and messages. That's about it. You could change the font color, it claimed, although it didn't work when I tried it. You would think after 7 years in IT, I would be able to figure it out. I'm afraid not, I couldn't get it to work. It didn't allow you to change the backround color or anything like that. I wouldn't consider it a website building tool at all. But it was free.

Next I tried Google's Page Creator. This was a much better option. So I looked into it more. Interestingly enough, Google offers the tool for free. All you have to do is sign up for a Google account. Well every business needs an email address, so why not? I signed up and I created a website. While building this website I found that while it had nice templates and was real easy to use, it was still a pretty basic website building utility. I had a very limited number of options when choosing the template, fonts and such. I was able to link pictures to it, I was also able to allow you to enlarge pictures for a better few. What I didn't like about this site was that as I wrote the descriptions out for my products, the spacing didn't have a lot of options and four products on one page took up so much room that you would have to scroll quite a bit to see everything. I don't like that at all. I've noticed that users want as little work as possible when viewing web pages. And when you're selling merchandise, you want your website to be as user friendly as possible. I may tinker with that site a little more to see what I could do with it. But after about two days, I got bored with it myself. That doesn't leave me with high hopes of site visitors.

I came across another tool for building your own website. I found it at officelive.com. This one is through Microsoft which I found interesting enough to look into. This site offered three different types of accounts, the standard one being free. So I signed up. I was quickly impressed by this site. It offered twice as much as google did and was much easier to figure out. It offered ideas of different layouts for different types of pages. It has much nicer quality as far as the background and images are concerned. And when I posted my merchandise on this site, I was very pleased to find that I could fit several products on one page with a picture next to each and didn't have to scroll so much my fingers went numb. I quickly and easily added about 8 different pages to it. Once I had the basic website the way I wanted it, there were a few more features I wanted to look into. One was a guest-book. I didn't find a tool on this site that would allow me to have a guest-book. So I did some research and found many websites offering free guest-books. I signed up for one, got my guest-book looking the way I wanted it. I found that it was very simple to copy the HTML code for the guest-book and paste it onto my website. Next I needed a way for customers to pay for their purchases. Well Pay pal seems to be the most popular. So through Pay pal, I found it very easy to build the buttons I wanted to use and copy the code over to my website. Now my website is complete. It was published immediately by Microsoft. Amazingly enough, Microsoft offers a wide variety of tools and reports to help you with your website, all for free. I am very happy with this site and would recommend it to anybody as it was pretty simple to figure out.

My advice to those that are interested in building websites would be to go to a search tool and see what comes up. Try several different sites before you settle on one. Many people pick one that looks simple and easy but end up getting frustrated and quitting because it doesn't do what they want it to do. You should try several different tools and utilities, for free, until you have a good feel for what you want to do and what services will help you do it. Then you will find the right tool for you. Definitely don't go out and spend a bunch of money or commit to subscription fees unless you know for a fact that you will gain enough profit from it. Start small and work your way up!