Once upon a time, building a website was very expensive. Now, you can have a site up and running for the price of a used book, if you’re frugal and careful. Getting an inexpensive website is a great first step on the ladder, to get started on the web and see if it’s for you.

Five-Dollar Domains.

If you’re willing to take the less popular domains like .info, or some of the ones for specific countries, then you should easily be able to get your hands on a domain for less than $5. Some countries, such as .tk (the small island of Tokelau), even offer their domains for nothing!

Free Software.

Nowadays, it’s possible to build a website using nothing but software you can get for free – most of the best scripting languages are free, and each one has a lot of free software built for it by hobbyists. Check out www.sourceforge.net, which is a big repository of free software.

You might think that free software would be less functional than paid-for software, but you’d be wrong. Plenty of free software is simply implementations of standard software, and it works perfectly well – if you want a forum, for example, there’s no clear advantage in paying massive license fees to vBulletin (the biggest seller of forum software) instead of just installing the free phpBB. The free software gives you more flexibility, and yet comes at no cost.

Free software has become an ideological movement, for people who want to be able to modify their own software, and much of the free software out there is quickly becoming widely-used and standard. Using free software doesn’t make you look cheap, because users are used to seeing it everywhere – even better, the chances are that they already know how to use it.

Templates.

Depending on what kind of website you’re running, you could use the design templates that come with your free software – they’re usually perfectly adequate. If you don’t want to do that, then a quick look around at a site like www.templatemonster.com is sure to turn up something suitable for your website that only costs a few dollars.
Also you can do a search on your favorite search engine for free templates and find a wide varitey to choose from. Using and modifing templates is also a great way to learn HTML and after that CSS, which will get you on your way to designing your own website.

Pay as You Go Hosting.

Instead of asking you to pay monthly for hosting, more and more hosts are starting to offer ‘pay as you go’ hosting, which means that you only pay for what you use. This saves you a lot of money, because websites that are starting out rarely use all the features and bandwidth they’re paying their host to provide.

At nearlyfreespeech.net, for example, you add money to an account and then pay one dollar for each gigabyte of bandwidth you use per month and $0.01 per megabyte of Disk Space (Storage) you use per month. Most of these hosts allow you to start an account with very little money – the minimum is usually $5. If you keep your site light on graphics, that first $5 can last you a very long time.

Guerrilla Marketing.

Finally, one of the biggest costs associated with any website is marketing it – whether you’re planning to pay for banner ads or ads in search engines, marketing is a big cost. You can save money, though, by resorting to more ‘guerrilla’ techniques, such as becoming involved in online communities than you think might be interested in your website. The biggest free marketing technique out there is SEO (search engine optimisation), which is when you build your website in a way that makes it more attractive to search engines, getting you targeted visitors for free.

Taking it Further.

Once you’ve built your budget website, do you need to upgrade it later on when you start to get lots of visitors? Often, the answer is no. You might wish to buy a more prestigious .com domain name, and you might want to pay a professional designer to improve your design, but in most cases the path from a budget website to a big one isn’t all that costly either. You might think you’re building a website ‘on the cheap’ but, really, that’s the most sensible way to do it now – while you can go and spend thousands of dollars on software and hosting, you’re unlikely to see any real benefits from it at all.

More websites are starting to offer RSS feeds, and more users are making use of RSS readers instead of visiting every website they want to read individually. But what is RSS, why is it getting popular, and most importantly, what can it do for you?

What is RSS?

RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’, and it does exactly what it says. Invented by Dave Winer one of the first webloggers, the format aims to provide a standardised way to obtain a website’s content. Instead of forcing people to try to pick it out of masses of HTML. It is a simple XML (strictly, RDF) language designed to make it easy to describe content.

Information RSS gives you about content includes its title, the dates when it was created and last updated, and its URL. There is also a space for content, which can either be used to provide a summary of the content at the URL or just to provide the content itself.

Which Version?

There is a bit of a controversy about the versions of RSS, for the simple reason that one is wildly different to the others. While RSS 0.9 and 2.0 are broadly similar, RSS 1.0 is widely considered to be a disaster, little software understands or uses it, as it’s just too complicated. For the most part you should stick with RSS 2.0 as it is the most virsitile and widely used.

How is RSS Produced?

While you could write a script of your own to turn your content into RSS (it wouldn’t be that difficult if you store your articles in a database), almost all CMS (Content Management Systems) and blog software packages do it for you automatically, if you’re looking for it keep an eye out for a small orange button that says ‘XML’ or ‘RSS’ on it. All you have to do is give some prominence to the RSS feed, with instructions to your visitors on what it’s for and how to use it.

With most software then, the RSS should be produced either when you update your content or, alternatively, every time someone asks for the RSS. It’s important to understand that RSS isn’t a ‘push’ mechanism, updating it doesn’t send changes to anyone until their software asks for them to be sent. This often means a window of five to ten minutes between something going in the RSS feed and people seeing it.
With “blogging” and RSS becoming more popular everyday there are now a large number of Blog Directories that you can “ping” whenever you update your site. The way this works is when you ping them, which means you are sending them your updated RSS feed and they include it in their site under the appropate catagory so visitors to their sites can find your feed.

How Do RSS Readers Work?

RSS readers work by allowing a user to ’subscribe’ to a feed, either by entering the URL of an RSS feed manually or by clicking on a link that starts with feed://. The reader then works something like an email program, retrieving new entries as they are added to the RSS and alerting the user, indeed they are similar enough that many email programs like Mozilla’s Thunderbird now include a built-in RSS reader.

When the user opens the new RSS entry, they will see what you put in the content area, usually with a link to open that page of your website in their web browser. You have to realise though, that they won’t see any of your ads or graphics in the RSS feed, so it’s best to give them some kind of incentive to click through.

What Else is RSS Used For?

RSS readers might be the most common use of RSS, but the format was designed to be used for almost anything. There’s nothing to stop you, for example, from taking an RSS feed from another website and publishing it on yours. You can even be an ‘aggregator’, mixing relevant content from the RSS feeds of lots of different websites to create a new, more useful website. If this sounds interesting to you, do a search on Google for either RSS aggregator or RSS+PHP and you will find many useful scripts that will allow you to add feeds from other sites to yours.

That’s where the word ’syndication’ in RSS’ name comes from, it lets you virtually syndicate other people’s content on your site, and it lets people syndicate your content on theirs. It benefits everyone, since the one doing the aggregating gets more content for their website, while the one being linked to gets more links to theirs. If you want to do well on the web, you should make sure you’ve got an RSS feed.

kiosk has added a new feature to its hosting package. Fantastico is a feature that allows you to add a varity of scripts to your website with the click of a button. Now I know there are many other hosting companies that already use this, but kiosk has been so busy improving their already great hosting packages and support that they simply haven’t had the time to do this till now. What is really cool is if you have your own server thru Kiosk, they will add this feature to your server for you for a very small fee