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Two key Elements make up the Internet:
1. Text
2. Pictures
If you hope to sell
on the internet, it's critical to appeal to your audience, those folks who are
willing to pull out their credit cards and buy your products. A huge
percentage of these are still on dialup and certainly aren't very
sophisticated and fancy techniques will isolate you from many of them.
So what are your choices if you want to build a website?
1. You can buy a template:
This can work well for one or two websites. But
there are some real problems with templates:
* They can become expensive - especially if you want multiple websites. Good
templates aren't cheap. Up in the $60-$70 range.
* If you don't know what you're doing, you can waste
a lot of money on templates
that won't work for you. You often see templates with
icons, pictures, logos, "Buy Now" buttons and more. Yes, they look
great. But when you download the images they are not editable because if
they are in jpg or gif format, you can't make changes. The most common
'editable' images are in 'psd' format. If you own image editing software,
like Photoshop (which usually sells for about $600), you can make the
changes you wish. But if you don't own this kind of software then forget it
- your images can't be changed.
* Editing templates isn't easy. You may purchase a template
that allows 8" of space - and your copy needs 10" of space. Now what?
Cheaper templates require the purchaser to "slice" them. This is tedious and
time consuming and requires editing knowledge that most people don't have.
Better quality templates allow the owner to edit them without slicing, but are more expensive.
* Even if you can edit your new template, do you really think that you
should allow a designer to dictate the placement of your sales copy?
Beautiful design does not equal sales. Just because something looks good
doesn't mean it's a good sales site. Many novices are impressed with the
good looks of a template, but often as not beauty doesn't equal profits.
Making money on the internet comes from effective direct marketing which
means testing the elements on your sales page and changing them until you
have a winner. If your design is forced on you you are limited in the
changes you can make.
2. You can pay a website designer to build a site for you:
* Hiring a professional can be expensive. Your money is better spent on marketing than design.
* Every time you want to make a change on your site, you'll
have to have your webmaster make the changes. Another BIG expense.
* Most web designers are focused on looks
and appearance, rather than functionality or sales. All the best marketers
acknowledge that plainer sites are more lucrative because the focus is on
the copy, the words, rather than fancy graphics or beautiful colors. Take a
look at the top money-making sites on the net. They rarely are flashy or
dramatically impressive.
* Having on a webmaster doing your work creates dependency.
The motivation of
entrepreneurs is freedom so waiting for another person to make even the
smallest changes to your site isn't taking you in the direction you want to
go.
3. You can buy site-making software:
Every program has a learning curve. One popular site
builder, for example, has a 500 page manual, is expensive and a lot of the
learning doesn't transfer to other site systems. The time you spend learning
the software could be spent learning an HTML editor that will make you
fully capable of building your own sites, whenever you choose, for almost
zero cost.
Spend the time and learn do it yourself websites. There will be moments of frustration, tears,
triumph, cursing, thrill of success, and you will emerge able to put
together websites whenever you choose.
Saying "I want to make money on the Internet" and not learning how to build
websites, is like wanting to be a cowboy - and refusing to
learn about horses; or like being a football star - and refusing to practice. So what if your first sites won't win a design award? You'll
can
better, you will be independent.
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