Webmasters Free Resources

Our list of webmasters free resources are intended to assist the new to intermediate web authors. When I first began, I had a pretty fair grip on how to create a reasonable looking web site but knew nothing about how to promote it on the net or how to design and write it so that it could achieve a reasonable ranking in some of the major search engines. As far as I am aware, no conventional college teaches this and industry courses are dammed expensive and a virtual waste of money until you have gained a reasonable understanding of the subject preferably by working through your desired creation and then trying to optomise it. My first creation was created the way I was taught. It got listed in Google first up and got dropped after about three weeks. This is a pretty common result for the uniniated.

There are many places on the web selling resources aimed at aspiring and relatively new webmasters. Some of these products are really good and some are inferior to many of the similar free resources available on the net. Unless you have access to some one with real net cred it is difficult to pick the genuine offers from the cons and believe me there appears to be many more cons and shades of grey jobs than genuine useful offers!

www.websitetips.com is a good place to start. If you are creating an 'information' type site, you will find a lot of usefull information here covering the use of various technologies and the efect they have on your search engine rankings and how to overcome these problems. If you want to build a serious site, this contains serious information and some reasonable tools to help you analyse your creation.

ww.searchenginewatch.com - some very good pertinent information on how to properly use the no frames tag.

www.northernwebs.com/set/design_notes_1.html - provides a lot of useful design information and quite a few free useful tools.

http://www.developerschoice.net/support/scripts.html some usefull scripts and programming information

http://www.super-software-deals.com/- a shareware site

http://phpnuke.org/ This is a Linux web authoring program that is somewhat similar to Dreamweaver but better in my view because php has so many powerful inbuilt features and if you are a good programmer you can write your own special features. It is a tool for the serious web programmer.

http://www.stickysauce.com/searchenginetools/analyzer.htm - some darn good free resources here and some broken links which are annoying

http://iafma.org/forums.html - internet affiliate marketing forums. It costs money if you wish to join.

http://www.webmasterbids.com/default.php - you can bid here and get some cheap advertising http://www.alexa.com/ - you can check how much traffic most sites are getting here. I actually prefer Google's page rank. Download their toolbar to use it.

http://www.321webmaster.com/ a useful site

.www.simtelnet.com - with a little effort you can find a free or low cost program to do almost anything those expensive big name bloated programs can do!

When you have made it, where are you going to host it? Unless you have deep pockets, checkout www.find-cheap-hosting.com

The best of the cheap deals I have found is .....well it fell over after about six weeks and was off the net for over a week. Needless to say, I don't use them now! At US$2.95 per month for the features provided, it seemed like a great deal. This site is now hosted on a USD $5 per month host.. In the first year or two, your site is highly unlikely to use more than 10MB of disk space or get 3,000 visitors per month ( twice the average) or use 1GB of data transfer per month. You can upgrade to a higher level plan if you get real lucky! I use www.pagesgarden.com for my larger sites as they offer a very competive deal where larger amounts of disk space and data transfer are required, they have fast servers that rarely have down time (according to the results from my monitoring service).

How are you going to promote it? Spending the extra time it takes to optomise your pages for your targeted search engines is well worth the effort as this is targeted traffic from people who are searching for your product. In the beginning, I used www.7search.com to see how many people were searching for my chosen design keywords each month. This is a pay per click search engine. After the site was up, I used pay per click advertising and cheap banner adds (40,000 clicks) from one of those traffic exchange sites. The banner adds quickly proved to be a waste of money so I added a little Java script to the page banner clickers went to. This little bit of code provided a detour to another site for those who stayed on the site for less than five seconds. In the first few weeks a lot of "clickers" had a detour but after that the quantity of the traffic decreased substantially and the quality of the banner traffic increased a little. I got terrific exposure because it took an eternity to get those 40,000 clicks but they contained negible value.

If you choose to go down the FFA page submission road make sure you set up an anonymous mail box. Never use your real e-mail address or an address that is not expendable. Within a few minutes of your submission, your mail box will start to fill up. After about six weeks the flood will start to subside and reach a manageable level. I set up a free yahoo.com mailbox and used an auto submission tool.(Hotmail is equally good for this purpose). When I finished, (about half an hour) I had over 200 messages in the inbox. They were coming in faster than I could read them. By the next morning I had over a thousand of them!

My experience suggests that they are not worth the time and effort it takes to delete what is effectively buckets of spam.

There are also opt-in e-mail schemes. Now, I haven't used them yet but I have come up with what I consider to be a novel idea that was spawned by looking into the concept of viral marketing. I want to try this one to see what response I get before I share it with you.

You will find opt-in email lists at http://www.yahoogroups.com, http://www.smartgroups.com, http://www.coollist.com and http://www.topica.com and if you run a search in Google or any other major search engine for opt in lists, I am sure you will find many more. When you start signing up for these get yourself a notebook and write down the particulars you submit. Use the same e-mail address and the same password for them all. There isn't anything confidential or secretive here. Sign up for one and send out your first message and give it a day to see what happens. You have to get used to handling the truckloads of mail you are going to get. If you sign up for them all on the same day, you could easily get 5,000 emails by the next day! Remember you have to agree to accept their e-mails for them to accept yours! Others tell me that they manage to make a few hundred dollars a month out of these lists. As we all know those who are making nothing tend to exaggerate their success (?) and those who are making real money seldom want to let on as to how well they are really doing because once every man and his dog jumps on the bandwagon they will no longer be making real money! On this one your guess is as good as mine!

My experience suggests that they are not worth the time and effort it takes to delete what is effectively buckets of spam.

A few sites picked up my first site from my adds in 7search and provided links to it. These sites had listings in Google. It wasn't long before the Google Spider picked up the links to my site and respidered and relisted it. Make sure you have at least one link to your site from a site listed in Google before you submit to them or better still wait for them to find you . If you are building a gambling related site, e-mail us and we will trade links with you and tell you how to set up your links page for maximum mutual benefit. We will trade links with most sites that operate a fair linking system with the definite exceptions of porn, online pharmacies and race hate type sites.

There are many pay per click search engines out there. Overture.com (Goto) was the first and also has a good set of tools to see just how many people are searching for a particular word. WordTracker is a good resource for this as it suggests related or similar words that people are searching for but it is fairly expensive. You can get evaluation copies of these and many other related programs but most have their better features disabled. After you get your site made, down load the evaluation copy (30 day limit) of WebPosition Gold. Its expensive to buy and the search engines that you can use the evaluation version for are now really irrelevant as they draw their information from other peoples directories but used intelligently, it will help you to under the optomisation process. You may decide you cannot live without it!

I have no affiliations with any of the sites mentioned here except those I have explicitly stated. I get no commissions or kickbacks from any of them. The information is provided in good faith to assist new webmasters to achieve a reasonable result at the least possible cost in the shortest possible time

I can be contacted via our 'contact us' page. I usually manage to reply within a couple of days. If you find good useful resources, please take a few minutes to let us know about them as this page will eventually be expanded into a useful themed website providing a lot more useful information. You could easily pay $20 for a verbose e-book providing less useful information than what I have summarised here!

If you want a little information on what to do before you start to build your site, checkout www.winnersrun.com/webmasters.php and their affiliate programs page. If you do not want your visitors to wander away, use our little 'tricks' to remind them where they started out and not to forget to subscribe to your site.Good luck with your site!