How Complex Does a Website Need to Be? » Aspects of Home Business Blog

Having a website can sound like a big deal if you’ve never had one before. You look around, and you see all these huge websites with thousands of pages. Is that what you need to do?

No. Fortunately it isn’t.

How complex your website needs to be depends on what you need from it. If you’re going to be an online writer and want your own site, just a page or two explaining your services is plenty to get things going. But if you’re going to be selling things, you will need a more complex site. How complex depends on how complete it needs to be for you to get a start.

Example 1: An Affiliate Website

If you’re going to be doing affiliate sales, you need a site that drives traffic through your links and helps you to build a list. But we’ll take the building the website step first.

There are a couple of ways to build an affiliate website. I suggest reading Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook if this is the kind of marketing you want to do. It’s a good place to get some solid information if you aren’t experienced in the affiliate arena.

One way is to build a site with product reviews. This kind of site can be started pretty small. Just start working on reviewing the kinds of products you want to sell. I suggest one review per page, and if the items are competing, a page where you compare them.

build a niche store

Another way is to use datafeeds in one form or another. Datafeeds allow you to create very large sites very quickly. There are some advantages to that, but they can also be a lot of work. Then again, there are a lot of tools, such as Build a Niche Store, which works through the eBay affiliate program, or PopShops, which allows you to build sites based on the datafeeds from various retailers whose programs go through Commission Junction, LinkShare, ShareASale, LinkConnector, Red Galoshes and Performics. They have both a free and a paid version, and they handle updating all the information for you. All you have to do is pick the products.

There’s good and bad to these, of course. The bad is that it is harder to customize your pages to make them more unique. The good is that they save you a TON of work in trying to keep your pages updated. Datafeeds can be pretty tedious to customize and update. But customization means that your pages won’t be exactly like the ones on every other affiliates’, and that is a very good thing.

A key thing to remember, no matter what kind of affiliate website you get going is that you cannot just fill it up with affiliate banners and expect to make money. I make very little use of the banners most merchants provide because I prefer to use either datafeeds or posting the links as text in a review or mentioning products in context. A page full of banner ads is not appealing.

I’ve done well with both kinds of sites. I like writing about the products when possible, but it’s pretty hard to keep writing enough. I’ve had a couple of Build a Niche Store sites do really nicely for me as well. My other datafeed sites have done all right, although truthfully I haven’t focused on them too much. But they do well sometimes when someone is searching for the exact item, and my site comes up in the results and gets the sale.

When it comes to designing the site, stick to fairly simple early on or hire someone to do it for you. There are places you can get free templates, places where you can buy individual templates, or places where you can sign up once and download as many as you want.

Another option is Ezy Websites. Their service helps you to learn to create your own templates. While you may not want to learn website design right away, I do recommend that you eventually understand at least the basics. Hiring someone to do it may sound like the easy way, but then you are at the mercy of their schedule for even the smallest of changes. You don’t want that all the time. Knowing something of what you’re doing will help.

Example 2: Blog

Blogging is a great way to start a website. The advantage here is that you don’t have to pay someone to design your site or know too much about doing it yourself… early on. I do recommend knowing the basics in the long run.

I’ve seen two schools of thought on blogging. One is to start right away on paid hosting with Wordpress or similar software. Others say start a throwaway blog on a free host to get a feel for things, then start the real one on paid hosting.

Yes, in the long run, paid hosting is the way to go.

I love using Wordpress because there are so many options available. You can use it as a blog or as a website. I strongly recommend buying Wordpress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin if you’re just starting out with it.

Wordpress is really not all that hard to use. Once you’ve learned how to upload the theme you want and any plugins you want, you’re in good shape. Some plugins will require that you find out where to place a bit of code, but in most cases they tell you the kind of thing you’re looking for, and in which file. Sounds hard, but it’s rarely that bad.

I’m the sort who likes to customize free themes. The theme on this blog was customized from a theme I found that most closely matched the rest of this site. I then worked on it to make them match more completely. But customization can be as basic as changing the header graphic or as complex as reworking much of the CSS and rearranging the different parts of the sidebars. Just depends on what you need.

What can be a real delight about blogging or just using Wordpress is that it creates your pages for you. Once everthing is set up, you just have to type your posts. It can be a huge time saver.

A blog can work for just about any kind of website. Affiliate marketers can use them to post reviews or just generally talk about their products. PopShops even has a free Wordpress plugin. People in direct sales can use them to build their businesses. So can website designers, writers and so forth. The flexibility is much appealling.

Here’s the fun part about blogs - you have the chance to allow people to participate in your website.

You can ask them questions, they can ask you questions. Readers can comment on what you’ve written.

Getting people to participate isn’t as easy as that in most cases, but if you build up a readership it can happen. And you can turn off comments if they just aren’t working out for you.

What About Search Engine Optimization?

SEO can be a tough topic. It’s not something you’re likely to excel at right away. It’s important to a website’s success, but if you focus too long on learning it before you launch your website, you’ll never get anywhere. Join forums such as Digital Point and Search Engine Watch. Consider investing in an ebook such as SEO Book. Read and learn.

Just don’t obsess about it. You will learn the most by doing and making mistakes. You’re not going to learn it all in time to launch your website. There’s a lot of information and it changes quickly.

This is one of the most important lessons you will learn in starting your home business.

Don’t overthink. Action is the only way you will succeed.