The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your First Business Website This book is written by Mike German For my other eBook "Make Money With Mike - The eBook" please visit my website: www.make-money-with-mike.com VERSION – JANUARY 2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED No part of this eBook may be reproduced, duplicated, given away, transmitted or resold in any form without written prior permission from the author Mike German 2010 Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com Contents Page Chapter Introduction Choosing The Right Domain Name Using Market Samurai To Find Keywords Registering Your Domain Name 11 Choosing A Hosting Company 14 Transferring Your Domain Name 17 Introduction To Joomla! 18 Installing Joomla! 21 Using Joomla! 23 If It's Too Good Too Be True It Often Is! 30 10 Installing A New Template 32 11 Creating A Menu System 38 12 Creating Your New Logo 43 13 Using Filezilla FTP software 44 14 Adding Your Logo To The Template Image 46 15 Working With Modules - Search Box 49 - Log-in Box 51 16 Backing Up Your Databases 57 17 A Final Word 58 Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com Introduction Hi my name is Mike German and you're about to discover what might be the most sought after hidden secrets of professional website design I would like to share with you all, my web design secrets of the trade in this eBook Other web design companies DO NOT want you to know this information as it will let you into the inner circle of web design and will expose the secrets web designers want to hide Many use the methods I will share with you and charge you, the customer, hundreds, even thousands of pounds by bombarding you with computer jargon and technical information that is designed to baffle and confuse I am primarily a graphic designer and had little to no knowledge of web design programming But over the last years I have gained all of the skills and knowledge to creating great websites from choosing the right domain name, designing very technical websites and hosting them on my own servers I have spent months and years learning everything to with this industry and by making mistakes along the way I have finally realised how it is done and what not to I have stripped out all of the unnecessary jargon and written this plain speaking eBook which explains everything you need to to create stunning business websites in under 15 minutes! And all for ONLY £3.48 per month! (The cost of your domain name and web hosting) You are about to discover what is the most popular FREE website creation software in the industry that may be a web designers best kept secret! You will learn how to build and manage your own website that is hosted on your own servers using your own unique domain name such as “www.yourdomain.com” in a few very easy to understand steps Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com Introduction I am NOT referring to the many companies out there that use a step-by-step Click & Build method like the one on www.homestead.com for example On the surface these “instant website” companies look good They have an amazing range of quality, professional templates to choose from as you build your website But before you sign-up to one of these companies… STOP! and read my eBook and you will discover the No.1 reason why you MUST it my way Regards and Good Luck Mike German Vizual Art Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com Chapter Choosing The Right Domain Name Before you anything, you MUST get this bit right It will be the foundation of everything that is built from this point on Your domain name is the starting point when deciding on having a website It will represent you and your company, so is a very important step very early on If you intend for your website to be found by the major search engines for your business sector the domain name you choose will play a very important part in being found Why can't I just use my company name as my domain name? Well if you are a plumber for example and your company name is D&I Plumbing you would assume that registering www.dandiplumbing.co.uk might be the obvious choice It's not a bad start because the name mentions “plumbing” in the domain name The problem is how relevant to anyone searching for plumbers is the “dandi” prefix? Nobody looking for plumbers would ever type in dandiplumbing as a search term You would try “plumbing” or “plumbers” or more likely for this market you would also include a local search i.e the town or city you live in So your search would look more like this: “plumbers Peterborough”, “Peterborough plumbers”, “plumbing in Peterborough” These search terms are niche terms that will concentrate the search on plumbers in the Peterborough area only But this is merely speculation You can assume that people must be searching for “plumbers Peterborough”, but wouldn't it be great to know that for definite? So with this information it's time to see what is really being typed into the search engines To this you will need to carry out Keyword Research What is Keyword Research? Quite simply a Keyword is the word that someone types into a search engine To Keyword Research you will discover what words are actually being typed on a daily basis If you know this information, you can then begin to piece together a picture of what keywords will work for your new domain name Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com Chapter Choosing The Right Domain Name What has a keyword got to with a domain name? Everything basically The major search engines, i.e Google being the largest, use a series of algorithms that their robots use to crawl the web for websites to list One of the known factors is the domain name of your website So I should call my domain name www.plumberspeterborough.co.uk? You can, but this was based only on an assumption that's what people are typing when searching for local plumbers We need to use software that will analyse the top search terms for Plumbers and Peterborough There is no point choosing plumbers Peterborough on the assumption it is right What if that particular phrase has no or little searches per day? It would be a waste of time using that name for your domain name if nobody was even looking for it! What software can find this out? There are numerous software packages out there that will find out this information, but having used a great deal of them I can recommend one in particular If you visit www.marketsamurai.com you will be able to download this software and some very helpful video tutorials absolutely FREE for a limited trial period This is a very comprehensive internet marketing tool that I will explain in greater detail in future eBooks Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com Chapter Using Market Samurai to find keywords When you have installed Market Samurai you will be given the option of starting a new project or opening an existing one Choose the new project to begin Enter the main keywords of your business in the Keyword box, i.e plumbers peterborough This can also be used as the Title Then choose where you want to save this project in File Then click Create You will now see a screen with options displayed You need to choose Keyword Research from the list You will now see the intro Keyword Research screen For the purpose of domain name research you can simply click on the Generate Keywords button in the top right, as we not need to add extra keywords at this stage After a short time your results will be displayed in the results window There may well be over a hundred results here, but you can filter out words and phrases that are irrelevant So eliminate keywords that are not associated with your business and then click on Analyze Keywords in the bottom right This may take a bit longer to return these results depending on your internet speed Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com Chapter Using Market Samurai to find keywords You will now see the main Keyword Research screen The table may look very confusing at first, but I will lead you through what you need to be looking at Searches and SEOC We are interested in two main areas of this table The first being Searches and the second, SEO Comp or SEOC for short In the top section of this screen we will see a title Competition and a sub heading below called SEO Comp (SEOC) with a plus symbol next to it Click on the plus symbol and enter a number of 10,000 This is the amount of web pages globally that mention a specific keyword in Google's index The lower the number the better The left column displays various keyword options from the Keyword Research results What we are looking for are the keywords with a high amount of Searches and a low amount of Competition (SEOC) If your chosen keyword phrase for your company returns a result of in the Searches column there will be no point choosing this for your domain name as it is not being searched for If you need to modify your keywords to try other words click on the Modify Keywords button in the bottom right and you will return to the previous screen Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com Chapter Using Market Samurai to find keywords In our example of “plumbers peterborough” the results show there are 24 searches a day and a competition of 5290 websites globally that contain the phrase “plumbers peterborough” As this phrase is highly relevant to D&I Plumbing who are based in Peterborough; have 24 searches a day and a moderately low competition level it is an ideal phrase to use for their domain name This may take a bit of practice at first to master, but you will soon get the hang of it It took me a few late nights before I had it perfected! Please bear in mind these top tips before choosing your domain name: Summary 1) Do not assume your company name is the best domain name to select Carry out some keyword research before making a decision and consider incorporating a keyword alongside the brand name 2) Short is better if we can it, but simple phrases can be fine Too long and we might get more typos 3) Keywords (which people actually use from your Keyword Research) in a domain are useful in making it clear what the site is about 4) Show a preference for co.uk top level domains (TLDs), but don't despair if we have to use other TLDs Any TLD can be brandable - it's just a bit easier with co.uk in the UK 5) Most people should avoid trade name and trade name typos Domain squatting on these kinds of names can lead to costly legal battles 6) Do grab the mistypes of your own domain Not for SEO, but to get traffic that might have not otherwise reached you Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com Chapter Registering your domain name So we have completed the Keyword Research; found the competitive keywords with high traffic and low competition and now we must find out if your new domain name is available to buy There is nothing more annoying when you have researched thoroughly what name to use and somebody else has registered it already! This is what you can if this happens to you: (i) Contact the existing owner directly and make them an offer (ii) Use a domain broker like Sedo.com to negotiate the price for the domain (iii) If your brand is strong, you could try out a different TLD (a net or com instead of a co.uk), or if your brand is new or not well known, try a variant domain (mybrand.com instead of brand.com) The easiest and indeed cheapest approach is the last option There are a number of ways to subtly change your domain name and still carry the same keyword strength There a several websites I have found that offer an automated service for finding domain name variations The best one being www.domainsbot.com where we simply enter your chosen domain name in the search box and let the software find all the available domain names either the same or similar to your search The great thing about this website is you don't have to keep trying different combinations as they will all be listed for you in the results table Create A Web Business NOW at www.make-money-with-mike.com ... engines, i.e Google being the largest, use a series of algorithms that their robots use to crawl the web for websites to list One of the known factors is the domain name of your website So I should... on the link to your domain name in the table you will be taken to the Your Domains page You can now assign ownership of your domain name to yourself or anybody else if you wish You may wish to. .. link to setup your Name Cheap account now www.namecheap.com I''m on the Name Cheap website, now what? The first thing to is enter your domain name in box titled “Enter the domain name you want” Top