These days, other people can do the work for you!
Never has it been as easy as it is to start a website or blog as it is now. There are multitudes of products available to create anything from a simple web page to a blog, or a full blown content management system, and many of them are excellent (and more importantly FREE!)
Years ago when I was at University studying for a degree in Information Technology, I would design small websites for businesses as part of the Swinburne Graduate Research Program. They were pretty basic sites by today’s standards, took some hours to put together, and we charged $100/hr because no one else had the skills to do it!
Mind you, I am talking about websites that were built with frames, basic gif images and the only thing fancy was a contact us form that sent an email. That was all you needed for a small business back in 1996 (and come to think of it, pretty much all you need for a small business website now).
One website I did was for a local MP and I even met the then Premier, Jeff Kennett, as he was on hand to officially launch our website! And, LOL would you believe it, the same site is still there! (albeit with new pages, different colours etc), but thanks to me for the HTML frames structure which still lives on :)
So what has changed?
No longer do you need skills with ‘vi’ or a text editor and HTML knowledge to produce a nice looking site (although it still helps).
These days you can go to wordpress.com to create a blog. Adding styles, templates and functionality is only a few clicks away.
Even a full content management system is sitting out there, nearly ready to go.
Portal websites for free
The reason I am writing a post on this topic of ready to install and use software is this
- We have just created a blog for one of our more popular websites, AutoSpeed.
- I am launching a site of my own soon, and I have chosen to use an open source CMS package to do it.
You see, I am no coding genius. I realised early on in my IT degree that writing code wasn’t fun for me, and I wasn’t great at it. I was good enough to learn enough to be able to code well enough when I was required to, but it wasn’t going to be my career.
So fast forward to now. Opportunities present themselves to you, and you don’t have a team of developers to create a portal website with forums, blog articles, galleries, and more.
What do you do?
Install Joomla or Drupal, and start adding functionality via their downloadable components and plugins.
You will only need to know the basics and even if you don’t wan’t to install it all yourself there are preinstalled hosted packages that you can buy cheaply.
Joomla is developed by a team of people who do it all for free (and some fame). You can find a heap of plugins, and there are some nice templates out there as well.
And, I can do it all myself. Its very rewarding.
So why not get some other people to do the work for you and use some pre existing software (like Wordpress that powers this blog) or a full blown CMS like Joomla?
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Great post! The Internet’s a beautiful thing these days. It’s incredibly easy to put up a site, but it’s also easy to get a business started online with enough curiosity and drive.
The real take-away I get from this post and your blog is that the Internet is getting smaller and more accessible. It’s this phenomenon that it’s enabled us to build and distribute our current product, ClixConnect.com.
We agree that more and more people are going online, and making a living there. With ClixConnect even the smallest business owner can connect with their site visitors/customers unlimited for free.
Not only are the barriers for entry being removed for novice Internet users, but businesses like ours are also leveraging these trends.