These days everyone from your teenaged
babysitter to your 91-year old grandmother seems to have her or his own
website. The ongoing explosion of interest in the Internet in general,
and ecommerce specifically, is further supported by social networking
sites like Facebook, and has transformed the personal or home business
website into a "gotta-have."
So why should you,
the homesteader, have your own website? Approached correctly, the
personal/hobby website can bring in an amazing level of extra income,
which is something we can all appreciate. A website gives you a whole new
platform from which to market yourself. Got a ton of extra produce this
year? Goats outdoing themselves in milk production? Want to clean
the extras out of the attic without junking perfectly good stuff? Your
website can help get the word out.
Now take it up
another level. Suppose you are a house painter and you're always looking
for more work. A website is a great way to present yourself to the folks
in the next town over. And anything you make, from soap to potpourri, is
fair game to sell on your website.
One case in point is
a Midwestern woman whose property abounds with tumbleweeds. As a joke,
she set up a website offering tumbleweeds for sale. To her shock, people
took her seriously and started placing orders on the site. Within a few
years she had supplied tumbleweeds to customers ranging from tourists to
NASA (for use in their Mars simulation) to Hollywood, and her "joke"
website was bringing in a few thousand dollars a year.
You can even make
money over and above what you sell through the magic of "pay-per-click"
ads. Remember those banner ads you've seen posted on various sites?
You can put them on your site too, and get paid every time someone visits
your site and clicks on the ad. Google
AdSense is the best-known ad program, and it lets you post ads to your
site with a quick cut-and-paste.
Now that we've gone
over the "why" of setting up your website, let's talk about the "how."
The first thing you need to decide is whether you want to reserve your
own domain, or settle for a sub-domain. In brief, a full domain is
its own separate entity (such as
homestead.org) while a sub-domain is a portion of a full domain (such
as forums.homestead.org).
A sub-domain will do
fine for a personal website or the tiniest of business sites. For a
serious ecommerce website, you will want to go ahead and reserve your own
domain name.
If you decide that a
subdomain is the way to go, then you will be able to host your site with
one of the free web hosting companies. Typically, the free hosting
companies offer you a subdomain and decent features, such as contact forms
for your site, but tech-support from these companies is poor to nil; if
you have trouble setting up your website or using the hosting company's
tools, you'll be on your own. I suggest you use
this tool to
find a free web host that offers the features you really want.
If you decide to get
your own domain name, you will probably also need to go with a cheap
(rather than free) web host. My own website is hosted by
BlueHost and I don't hesitate to
recommend them; they have a very easy-to-manage interface and a solid
feature set, so that if your site does grow over time you don't have to
worry about moving it to a better hosting company. They also have a
site-builder wizard that lets you build a site using one of their
templates, without any HTML knowledge on your part. And they will
pay for registering and renewing your domain name as part of your hosting
package (which is definitely something you should insist on, whatever
hosting company you choose). I've also heard good things about
GoDaddy as a web host, although I've
found their site tools to be a lot more confusing than
BlueHost's.
Choosing a domain
name for your site can be a tricky business. The specifics are beyond the
scope of this article (although if you are curious you can read
this article,
by yours truly, on the subject) but I will touch on a few of the most
important factors. First, it should be easy to type. Second, it
should be memorable. And third, if you are setting up a business website,
choose a .com extension and DO NOT settle for .net or .biz. Yes, there
are a lot more domain names available if you settle for an obscure
extension, but you will lose so much traffic from people who automatically
type ".com" at the end of your domain name that the compromise is really
not worth it.
