Article of the month: "Your payable role in the internet. A little help to a creative person." All about the WEB and more

A little help to a creative person (article of the month)
by A. Mukhanov, 2008

A lot of people are in search of information. There are many ways to get it. You have now found something here, in the internet. We are always glad when we get what we looked for.

Nowadays you may share your interests and valuables with all the people around the world. And you could also get some in return. You don’t have to be cut out for web-design. Different software or (even easier) web-services offer simple web-page creation. All you need is your enthusiasm and a piece of unique information to show it to the world. It could be your photo album, hobby, knowledge of something etc. But it should be interesting or useful in any way. Here is the point: the information submitted has to be valuable for certain group of people. The wider is the group - the better. Otherwise it would be another piece of useless web, slowly dying under the incoming high-quality information. For instance: If you breed the cats, you may create a web-page about it. This page will be interesting to those getting some information about cats.

Overlooking theoretically, we may see a little profit here from the business point of view. Sharing our information, we may advertise something and earn money. It is exactly as any media earns for living:

Radio: music + some commercials

TV: films, programs + some commercials

Internet: information + some commercials

I used to think it is pretty complicated for a regular internet-user to learn web-page creating and benefit from it. Used to. It now seems to be simple.

One of the most powerful, flexible and reliable advertisement supplier is Google. Though there are lots of them. You may search, browse and choose - you will find them easily. I would recommend to start with Google as it is convenient and easy to start with. Adsense - the Google’s feature has been designed particularly for adding advertisements to your web-site. They pay you when your web-page visitors click on the banners or text ads. They pay more when your visitors buy their goods and services. The important thing is that Google displays ads, which are relevant to the content of your site. Google automatically analyze your site content. In the other words, if you run a web-site about bees and honey production, your visitor won’t be distracted (or even disappointed) seeing, for instance, the irrelevant advertisement leading to the dating site or to the travel agency.

Getting started, you should have a place to store your files in the internet. That means you should find a web-hosting and buy a domain-name (like www.yoursitename.com) There are a lot of companies, starting with those offering a web-hosting for free (very often with their own ads on your page) to the expensive ones. How to choose? Just type “buy affordable web hosting” in Google and choose. If you are planning to offer to your visitors mostly text-information, you will be more than enough satisfied even with a hundred megabytes of space. Nowadays hosting space becomes more and more affordable. This site is hosted by 3iX.org – one of the cheapest and reliable hosting/domain services then the majority of others. I do not offer you use 3iX, just recommend to compare the prices )) Normally, hosting companies offer you to buy domain name with them, so you don’t have to search for domain name separately. Moreover it could be pretty tricky without any experience to link domain-name andhosting both bought in different places.

We have finally approached the very site-creation. If you are completely low on budget you’ve got no option but learning at least the HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). It is the language which browsers (like Internet Explorer, Opera, Netscape Navigator etc.) can read and display. HTML is rather simple to learn, there are plenty of related material in the internet. But it would take some time and practice. To make your page interactive or dynamic (for example to let your visitors comment on your content), you would better also learn PHP (or ASP etc.) It is much more difficult then HTML and you’d better attend some courses. You should be a designer in a way to place text and graphics on the page to make it looking nice. It is useful to learn a bit about graphic file formats to optimize the graphics on your page thinking of those with slow internet connection.

There are other ways which may help you. You may find a company which will make a website for you. All you need to do is to give them certain instructions and material. It could be rather expensive. If you are getting your web-site from the company, you’d better ask them to give you instructions on how to install the advertisements on you’re your page later. Otherwise, it could be complicated. Web-design services are likely to be expensive, although sometimes they let you to get an outstanding web-site. These services are mostly being used by companies, as web-site will normally promote their business and usually cover the expenses.

If you are not planning to put a goodish sum of money into your project nor having a time for learning, there is another way - several web services offer you friendly interface and online support on web-page creation. Honestly, I was impressed seeing them first time. As a web-developer (my very first web-site was created in 1999) I envy the way those services let uneducated users operate with the most modern tools, which had earlier being used only by experienced web-programmers. I would particularly name "Site build it" as they have a friendly interface, impressive quality of the products and rational price range. Besides, they were particularly developed to help people creating profitable web-projects.

Eventually when your website is ready, it is time to submit it to the search engines for indexing. After couple of weeks or earlier your site will be added to the search engine database. To add your site to the major search engines, follow the links:

One more thing to remember - do not try to copy the content from other websites. Search engines won't give you top places regarding this content. The more of unique content you have - the higher your place in search results - the more visitors you get. I wrote this article to encourage you creating quality pages, share your experience and knowledge. In return – you can earn something. I know people who do so full-time. Advertisements could cost you or it could make you a profit. And certainly they are the way of interaction between people.