You'll need tools that will help you to build your pages:
Many business programs such as Microsoft Word provide you with the ability to save a document as a web page. These editors don't usually produce very well constructed pages. For one thing, they don't provide you with a basic web-page-like structure, so your page may look amateurish. For another, they usually add in a lot of extra code, so your pages will be slower to load than ones created in a special website editor. If you keep your pages short, which you should do for your visitors' sake anyway, that may not be a problem. But Word was not originally designed as a web page generator, so you'll only get basic web functionality, and none of the predesigned templates or site planning and navigation tools that a web editing package will provide.
Another way of creating pages that are readable on the web is to convert them with
a tool such as PDF Converter 5
.
PDF files are a little slower to load into visitors' browsers, but they have
the advantage of preserving a document's formatting, and Google can search their
contents as well as regular web pages. You'll still need some sort of tool
to link them together into a website. But you can use an inexpensive WYSIWYG
tool for that (see below).
The most widely used tools on the market for designing tools in a visual environment
are Microsoft® FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver®. They are elaborate and expensive
tools. If you are only creating one site, they're not worth the investment or the learning curve.
There are easy-to-use tools available for $35 to $59, like
CoffeeCup Big Cup
,
a suite of products that work just fine.
You may need an additional tool, such as Form Maker if you want to build forms, surveys and other interactive pages.
HTML stands for "Hypertext Markup Language". It's the language in which web pages are written. It's not terribly difficult; it's about as hard to learn as a spreadsheet program. You will find numerous free tutorials and courses on the web to help you get started, such as "Build Your Own Website" at Suite101.com
You should use a website editor, such as Trellian Web Page, which is free, or
CoffeeCup HTML Editor
,
which costs $49 but includes a WYSIWYG editor. They'll help you organize your site and provide helpful little buttons and such to do things like adding links.
Even if you code in HTML, you might want to use a pre-designed graphic template as a basis. There are thousands of templates available if you want to add a little pizazz to your pages. Many are free. Others are very inexpensive (about $35 to $50) and add a professional look to your site. For a list, see More resources.
You can incorporate some programming into your pages without knowing how to program. There are sites that provide ready-written scripts like The JavaScript Resource or Webmasters Cavern. They give you the scripts to cut and paste and tell you where on the page to paste them.
If you can find your way through a page of HTML, you can create BUY NOW or DONATE buttons via PayPal and insert them into your page. The signup procedure is the hardest part of the process. Be prepared for it to take a couple of weeks from start to finish, and have your bank account information handy. Once you've gone through the signup procedure, you just click on the Merchant Tools tag and fill out a simple form. They give you the code to cut and paste into your page. They'll even provide you with a shopping cart. All this is free until you sell something, which is when they take their cut of about 3%.
If you're selling in large volume, say $1000 a month or more, you may want to consider a Merchant Account with a company other than PayPal, such as Capital Merchant Solutions. They charge a lower percentage of your selling price, but they charge a monthly minimum.
Look at all your web pages in at least two popular browsers: Microsoft Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. If you're developing your pages on your local computer, you can view the pages without uploading them to your server. In your MS Explorer window, click on File > Open...> Browse... and click on the name of the HTML page. In Firefox or Netscape, click on File > Open File...
You are testing to see that the page looks good, and that all your links work.
Also,you should try the pages in different screen resolutions. To do this, on a PC, in the Start menu, click on "Control Panel", "Display" and "Settings". Slide the little slider up or down to increase or decrease the resolution.
Even once you have tested it on your PC or local server, test it again once you have uploaded it to your web server. The most experienced web developers make mistakes!
When you're all finished making sure the page looks okay, you'll need to give some thought to whether it's optimized for search engines. A good, free tool for testing that, and also for learning a lot about proper page construction, is Sitening's SEO Analyzer.