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Creating an Online Presence with a Limited Budget |
More and more people are looking online to create a business. And why not? Millions of dollars worth of products and services are bought and sold each day. Compared to brick and mortar shops, the internet allows even small time business owners to tap a very huge market. So what’s keeping them from jumping at the chance to create their own website?
A lot of people think that setting up a website is difficult. Many are also afraid of the cost of building a website. If they are thinking of approaching a design agency, then they should be. They could easily be charged thousands of dollars for custom design and development. If you are knowledgeable in HTML and graphic design, you should do it yourself.
Adobe’s Creative Suite and Macromedia’s Studio MX are popular high-end packages used by professional design agencies and web development firms. Each cost nearly a thousand dollars. But you don’t have to shell out that much in order to have a professional looking site. Many people are not aware that there are a lot of open source programs out there that you can use. Below are just some of the wonderful applications given away for free by the open source community.
Nvu – An open source HTML WYSIWYG editor similar to FrontPage or Dreamweaver. Not as full-featured as Dreamweaver, but it’s more than enough for typical web authoring tasks. It provides powerful visual HTML editing with great CSS manipulation features. Nvu is still an application in development, but it’s already looking good.
Gimp – The open source answer to Photoshop. Not quite as powerful, but then again, it’s not quite as expensive either. Gimp is great for the common photo-editing tasks and is powerful enough to create astonishingly complex art in the hands of a skilled designer.
Inkscape – Illustrator’s free alternative. It does what Illustrator does best, create vector art. The program includes a basic bitmap tracing program to convert raster images to vector images. The program is user-friendly, and best of all, free.
If you are familiar with basic HTML, you can purchase a professional web template instead. These are pre-build websites created by real professional designers, but do not come with hefty price tag. Web templates are a fast and cost-effective alternative. You can also find many flash-based web templates that give home pages a more interesting effect. Customization is often just a matter of changing some text. Experienced designers can further customize the site by manipulating the included source files.
However, if you anticipate massive updates to your website content, you might consider using a content management system. Large companies pay thousands of dollars for this functionality. Thankfully, you don’t have to spend a dime because there are a lot of open source content management applications out there. Below are just some of the most popular types of content management systems available for free.
PHP-Nuke – This is the father of community portals. Unlike other systems, the focus of PHP-Nuke is to provide website owners with a platform to create online communities by having modules like forums, member management, news article management, and polls. Being one of the older systems, it has a massive user base and plenty of add-on modules for additional functionality.
Wordpress – If blogging is your thing, consider this amazing application. Considered by many as the best blogging tool, it easily beats expensive proprietary systems. Wordpress is great for blogs and news-type websites because of its easy to use features and article/post archiving features.
Typo3 – This is the open source answer to enterprise class content management systems. It’s probably too complicated for non-technical people, but it features some of the most extensive functionalities in automated web publishing. The system is as complex as it is powerful. Not a great choice for small to medium websites, but great for large ones.
So far, all of these suggestions require some good knowledge in web development. If you are not that comfortable with coding, you don’t necessarily have to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars for help. You can go to various Freelance sites and get a programmer to do this for you. Popular sites where you can get programming work done cheaply include Rentacoder.com and Scriptlance.com | | Author Info: Anthony Guillermo is an internet technology enthusiast who enjoys spreading the word about the practical advantages of building better web experiences - achieved by optimizing design, code authoring, and web copywriting. Aside from being an online entrepreneur and marketer, he enjoys participating in open source projects. You can see his website at http://www.e-nordstrom.com |
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