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!

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. 

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!

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.

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 www.paulawynne.com.

Amazon link: 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!

Pages are called different things by different people or experts. Understanding these terms will help you to build and develop your site efficiently and professionally. A grasp of the terms and how best to develop certain types of pages will be important as you become a little more ambitious with your website’s development.

Parents, Children and Orphans

Parents are the main navigation elements you see on most sites. They are also known as ‘categories’ and ‘primary links’ in some CMS systems. For example: a ‘Parent’ on Remote Worker Awards would be ‘Enter’ and ‘Judges’.

Parents are generally used as the main section pages. ‘Children’ or ‘secondary links’ are pages that lead off the ‘Parent’ page. In this Remote Worker Awards example you will see that each ‘Award Category and Judge’ has their own page stemming from the Parent.

As the name suggests, Orphans are normally pages that have somehow lost their parents. Most commonly, this is when you have inadvertently removed their parent page.

Content, Static and Dynamic Pages

Content pages, static and dynamic pages is another area that can be extremely confusing with different platforms and developers calling these pages different names, including ‘static blocks’ and ‘page blocks’. My book gives full explanations on these terms but the main considerations is that you want and need to be in control of your pages and what role they play on your site. Learn the difference between these terms to help you understand what your site software is capable of performing.

Read the full article on Website Navigation or get a free sample chapter.

Most CMS provide an editing tool which has a ‘what you see is what you get’ interface. This type of editor is fondly known as WYSIWYG (pronounced wizzie-wig). This makes editing your pages flexible and easy, so remind yourself of your brand values and stick to them.

CSS Style Sheets

Imagine you write an article, and decide to make the headline orange, which you think goes nicely with the yellow colour scheme of your site. A year later, when you update the design to a different colour, you have to go through and change every article that you coloured orange. A laborious and tedious task. If you did it using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) you would simply change one colour value in a separate file, and it would be reflected on your entire site instantly.

After writing Create A Successful Website and my second book, Pimp My Site, (due out on Amazon soon) I started a digital marketing club called Pimp My Site Club. It gives new web owners and small businesses easy access to the media through the Publicity Club and my PR Services.

After only a couple of months members have found the media requests helpful in getting their business in front of journalists and some have already been featured in magazines and newspapers. Visitors and members are invited to pitch their site to my media contacts through Press Releases And Pitches.

Why am I telling you all this when I should be talking about CSS? Because I am creating a CSS Style Sheet through Artisteer, a powerful software program that allows you to create a page layout along with headers, footers and CSS styles as per this example screenshot below. You can change colours and fonts with a quick click and then implement the changes into your site.

Read the full article on Navigating your Website or watch this blog for the next days to see the next extract from my bestselling book, Create A Successful Website.

I hope you have already seen the first two articles on Planning and Researching a Website and Branding a Website, if not take a quick peek at them and then follow this series on Navigating a Website.

Now that you’ve established your brand and explored ways to use it effectively, let’s discuss your website navigation.

CMS: Content Management System

A CMS is software or an ‘admin’ area for managing your website content, thus known as a Content Management System. It is the engine that allows you to manage the site, add content and gives you control 24/7. It also makes life easier and is way, way cheaper than having to constantly ask your developer to add content for you. That is just not an option!

Today, most websites are developed for you to log in and manage your ‘front end’ (what people see) by making changes to the ‘back end’ (your admin or CMS).

If you are developing a site with a development company then insist on having your own bespoke admin section so you have complete control of your site. This admin should enable you to control page content, your banners, layout, navigation and page order. From a long term and short term view this is definitely the way to go. In fact, I would go so far as to say, if a developer doesn’t offer a CMS system go somewhere else!

Read the full article on Website Navigation here or watch out (in the next few days) for the next extract from my bestselling book, Create A Successful Website.

Branding Brief

Create a briefing document to determine how your website’s brand should be used. Large corporate companies spend a vast fortune on their brand documentation and, for obvious reasons, only give certain people the right to manage it.

You can do the same on a smaller scale by drawing up a simple Word document starting with your logo at the top, company name and brand objectives. See my book Create A Successful Website, for full guidelines on what should be included in your branding brief.

You should consider using only one font or at the most only one or two similar fonts throughout your website, with different sizes for headers, sub headers and body text. Verdana size 10 – 12 is a safe bet. Only use easy fonts that all browsers can see and read. Once you have decided what they will be, stick to them rigorously and don’t deviate from them.

Today we set about planting your branding seeds to ensure style, layout and creating a recognisable and trusted brand.

To ensure your site communicates who you are, what product you feature or which service you offer, and what your brand promises, be consistent in design, logo and page content.

Best wishes for your website!

Read the full article on how to brand a website.