By Frann Leach
If you want to be taken seriously online, you need certain tools. It's like a gardener: if you want to do a proper job, you can't manage without at least a spade or a garden fork, a hand trowel, and so on.
New gardeners may be able to beg or borrow their tools. You may think that's not possible for you. But online businesses can also obtain all the tools they need to set up and run a website, absolutely free, from the net itself.
To set up an online business, at the very least you will need a domain name, a website and a hosting company. It's true that you can start off with a free blog on Blogger.com or WordPress.com , and this may be a good place to begin, but you should regard this as more of a marketing medium, rather than your main base of operations. When it comes to making money online, you can't beat the control and potential you have with your own domain name and site.
If you're not in a position to pay someone to design it for you when you're ready to set up your site, as is the case for most of us, or if you'd rather spend your cash elsewhere, you will need an html editor. There are many of these available, from Microsoft's FrontPage to Dreamweaver and SiteBuildIt. But these all cost a fair amount of money. What can you get without shelling out the moolah?
Website Creation tools which will cost you nothing
You don't need to spend a lot of cash, or any at all, to get a real What You See Is What You Get ('wysiwyg') html editor. One example is FirstPage 2000, which is a free editor. The same company produces a "paid for" upgrade, FirstPage 2006, so their free offering is probably provided as a "teaser" to get you interested in buying their product. That's fine, it tends to mean that the freebie will be of pretty good quality (though I haven't tried this one myself).
The one I use, which is NOT wysiwyg, although you can preview at any time just by clicking on a button, is called CSE HTML Validator. It comes in three varieties: Light, Standard and Pro. I started out with CSE Light (which is free), then upgraded later on. There's no obligation to upgrade, although you do get reminded every couple of weeks, but the extra facilities are worth it to me. As you might have guessed, this software will check your code for you and let you know if there is something missing or in the wrong place. You can obtain it from http://www.htmlvalidator.com .
Best Website Creator you can buy, for online marketing
I briefly mentioned three well known pieces of website creation software earlier. These were Frontpage, Dreamweaver and SiteBuildIt. Though most people think of them as being similar products, in fact, they are each completely different.
Frontpage is a Microsoft product. Many web hosting companies provide "Frontpage support", because it is generally popular with beginning webmasters, and because it has its own non-standard features built in, which require support. I've been presented with Frontpage code in the past and asked to amend it.
Even though you can probably obtain a copy of Frontpage quite cheaply, from what I've seen, I would definitely not recommend it. This is partly because of the non-standard features, and partly because the code it produces is very large, with many repetitions, which will slow up the loading time of any pages made with it. Loading time is important. There's no point in wasting it just loading up redundant code.
Dreamweaver is part of the Adobe stable. It is a brilliant product, and integrates well with many other products from the same group. But it is extremely expensive, and has a very steep learning curve. So unless you're willing to devote a couple of months to getting to grips with it, I would not recommend this product either.
Finally, there's SiteBuildIt. This is a completely different proposition, because it was built by people who know how to build a profitable website.
Most people starting out, and even many professional web designers, are not familiar with the ways of attracting visitors. A web designer will often just set up a website according to your instructions, and leave it up to you to attract the customers you need. Sometimes a website which may look very attractive and impressive can be very counter-productive, because of factors which are not obvious to someone focused just on 'design'.
The secret of a good website lies, not so much in its beauty or lack of it, but in its results. So, if you prefer to purchase a website creation package, rather than downloading one for free, SiteBuildIt is the package I recommend. You can obtain it from
Summary
To sum up, the product I recommend for website creation is:
CSE HTML Validator from http://www.htmlvalidator.com (which is free)
I hope that you have found this first article in my Essential Tools series helpful, and I wish you every success in your online venture.
About the Author
Frann Leach is webmaster of http://www.yoursuccessfocus.com and lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
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