Essential Prep For Starting A Home Business

Before you start up a home business you need to spend time planning, researching and brainstorming. Set short and long term goals and objectives for your home based business, freelance consultancy or website business to steer you in the right direction.

INSPIRE juicy thought patterns

• Print off your plan and take it with you
• Add more details when on the train or bus
• Scan the notes, then drift into creative mode
• Having your plan with you, will give you an organised way to edit and pump up your website.

Learn how to analyse your strengths and weaknesses as well as any potential threats and most importantly, the opportunities that raise their heads.

As you plan your shiny new website, you need to understand and explore every avenue of your online business so that you are fully prepared. The work you do now will be reinforced along the way.

Read the full article on how to plan and set goals for your home business or freelance agency: http://ihubbub.com/article/essential-prep-starting-business

 

 

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iHubbub

Have you seen iHubbub’s blog!

We are out to find all interesting home working blogs, remote working blogs, freelance blogs and home business blogs. You can add your own blog through iHubbub – simply register, log in and go to Add Blog!

When you add your Directory listing and mention your blog, it will be showcased on our blog page – check out our member blogs down the right hand side.

Or get in touch to tell us about any other great blogs you feel should be featured on iHubbub’s social network.

If you’re an expert or industry specialist and would like to write a guest blog for iHubbub, please drop us a line or submit your articles.

Best of all you can advertise your home business or freelance consultancy in iHubbub’s Market. Sell and swap or simply poke around and support other like minded home business members!

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Get Your Moonfruit Free Website

Moonfruit is another great piece of ‘drag and drop’ kit that can get anyone up and running in a morning or afternoon.

If you want to change text, you simply click on it and change it. If you want to move an image, just haul it across the page, or drag the corners to change its size.

There is no technology to learn, no techie code, no form filling, just quick and easy tools that work wonders for seeing your site in action right under your fingertips. There is a little box called ‘View My Site’ and each time you make a change you can click this to see the changes on the live site.

I created this site on a Saturday afternoon last year while I was writing Create A Successful Website.

Moonfruit really is so easy to use and has SO much to offer. Pop over to www.moonfruit.com to see for yourself.

This past week we have ventured into the world of free websites and realised there is no harm in choosing a simple blog to start off your new online business. Create A Successful Website delves into the abundance of great free sites out there and even if you want an imaginative project you can still get it for nearly nothing or even completely free.

Next time we’ll get stuck into paid sites. Even though most of us will flinch at the word ‘paid’, many paid sites don’t have to have the ‘ouch’ factor and may be precisely what you’re looking for.

If you can’t wait to see anymore get a free sample chapter or buy the book on Amazon. You may also want to take a peek at a few eBooks which feature other chapters in my bestselling book, Create A Successful Website. 

Good luck in finding a free website!

 

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Drupal Open Source

In the next part of this series taken from Create A Successful Website which covers Free Websites, we talk a little about Drupal’s power as a way to set up your own website or internet business.

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organise a wide variety of content on a website. Drupal is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people, and most of them experienced developers, all over the world working on the software and so you get the benefit of their experience and expertise for free.

It offers a broad range of features and services including user administration, publishing workflow, discussion boards, news aggregation, metadata for optimisation and XML publishing for content sharing purposes.

Drupal is perhaps the most complex CMS available and without question the most powerful and flexible. It is perfectly suited to community and membership sites, with many social features built in. It has an API, meaning it can play ball with other applications and websites, such as Twitter and Facebook. It has a massive community of dedicated friendly developers, who create and maintain literally thousands of extensions, which will cover just about any requirement you could ever dream up.

It may not be easy to get to grips with, but with the widely available tutorials and one day workshop courses, such as the ones IKOS runs, it will be easy enough to teach yourself how to use Drupal for your website. All that’s required is your time and imagination. Take a look at drupal.org.

Take a look at this site I created using Drupal, it is pretty basic but shows what can be achieved with a bit of teach yourself motivation.

Watch out for the next part coming in a couple of days. If you can’t wait to see anymore get a free sample chapter or buy the book on Amazon. You may also want to take a peek at a few eBooks which feature other chapters in my bestselling book, Create A Successful Website. 

 

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More Free Websites

Moving on from the previous extracts from my bestselling book, Create A Successful Website, we look at a few more options to get a free website.

Just as you can get online in minutes with a blog, there are similar free sites. They all have different benefits and features so take a good look at the ones I have listed below. See if you can find some of your own. Research each of them in turn. Take the tests and trials before you spend too much and effort developing your site on one platform as another solution might be better suited to your requirements and website brief.

Here is a list of some sites I found:

· Amazon Advantage

· Amazon aStore

· Drupal

· GBBO

· Moonfruit

· Joomla

· WordPress (.org)

I haven’t got space here to go into all of these, but I have given each of them a special section in Create A Successful Website. However, I would like to give a quick mention to a few that are well worth investigation. So watch out for the next in this series on how to find the best free website for your start up internet business!

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Free Websites

In the next part of the series taken from extracts out of Create A Successful Website, we look at a number of different options open to you, from a simple blog, to a freebie el’ cheapo thingy-majig or a fancy-dancy specially built site. Whatever your preference, we’re all set to get cracking on what kind of site to choose. I would recommend testing all the free sites listed below to see which you find the easiest to use and, when you’re getting along like next best friends, then decide which one is for keeps. Or move on to Hosted Websites to see if there is a better option for your online adventure.

Blog Website

A Blog is a great way of getting online in a flash. A blog is an abbreviated version of ‘weblog’, which is a term used to describe web sites that chronicle or log information. However, they can be, and often are, used as a website.

A Blog is clever software that allows you to post articles and enables easy interaction with your audience; people can comment on your topic and you can reply. Blogs feature a wide range of diary-type entries from personal to corporate across a huge assortment of subjects. Some are personal journals of the author’s daily life, while others are meanderings on topics or ramblings on current or newsworthy issues.

If you are starting out and not sure what you want to do, try setting up a free blog in Blogger or Word Press. This will give you start up experience on working with a blog website. It will also show you how to add pages and content, and how to implement widgets and gadgets into your site. Go to blogger.com and/or wordpress.com for a quick snoop around.

Watch this space for the next part of how to create a successful website with your own free website – coming this week.

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Navigation Map

Create A Successful Website gives a full navigation sample and details how to map out a brief with the key ‘menu’ areas. It will also give you a comprehensive list of ‘navigation rules’ to help you develop a simple and consistent navigation map. It explains why ‘ranking’ or ‘weighting’ your pages is important to your navigation and why you should have a sitemap.

You can also learn about using breadcrumbs, or a ‘breadcrumb trail’, which is a navigation path used to give visitors a way to keep track of where they are within your website. The last time I looked, Remote Employment had 7,501 pages and counting so you can imagine why a breadcrumb trail comes in handy.

Over the last week we have started to understand the terms used in creating a website menu. We also explored various options for your new site’s navigation map and learnt how to keep all the family in the right place.

The old fashioned way to do this could be to lay out postcards on the floor. You can use one postcard for each section which is then numbered by area. Or you can use a superfast digital format in Word or Excel.

Essentially, you should focus on organisation of the content. Now is the time to think seriously about which page what does and what goes where.

In a sense, it is ensuring that each member of the family is living in the right area, under the correct roof and with accurate clothing. Use the time now to go back and see what these ‘good sites’ did with their navigation and how they steered you through the maze that otherwise could have been a struggle. Make notes of what they do well and where they fall down, if they do at all, so your navigation can be as good, if not better.

Read the full article on Website Navigation or get a free sample chapter. Watch out for the next in this series, where we’ll discover a smorgasbord of free websites.

Good luck with your navigation!

Biog:

Award-winning entrepreneur, speaker and bestselling author of ‘Create A Successful Website’, (on sale on Amazon) Paula Wynne offers practical workshops to help you succeed online. Read more about Paula’s books, creating a website articles, search engine optimisation, PR and other start up business advice at http://www.paulawynne.com.

Amazon link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1907498354/ref=nosim?tag=createasuccessfulwebsite-21

See Paula’s YouTube channel where Woman and Home Journalist Fiona Wright gives her view on Create A Successful Website: http://www.youtube.com/user/paulawynne

‘Create A Successful Website’ endorsed by:

* Claire Young, The Apprentice

* Caroline Marsh, Secret Millionaire

* Rachel Elnaugh, Dragon’s Den

* Dee Blick, FCIM, Financial Mail

* Elisa Roche, Daily Express

* Fiona Wright, Woman and Home

* Paul Handley, Iconic Gifts

* Prue Leith, Julie Hearn, bestselling authors … and many more!

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