One of the first things you need to concider when you are designing yur website is the color scheme. Once you decide on what colors you want to use and where you are going to place them the rest will normally fall into place with a little more planning. Choosing the wrong colors though can cause you to have a bad looking site no matter how good the rest of your design is.
Pay Attention to Contrast.
First of all, before you do anything else, you need to check that the colors you’ve chosen provide enough contrast for your text to be readable. Don’t put orange text on a yellow background, or red on blue, or anything like that. You should especially avoid using a lighter version of a color on top of a darker version of that same colour, or vice versa. You’ve got to make sure that your text is readable.
Never Use Black Backgrounds.
You can generally use whatever colors you like as part of your color scheme, but stay away from black backgrounds. It makes your website look ‘underground’ and threatening, not to mention old-fashioned. The only people who will like it will be dyed-in-the-wool computer nerds and people who get headaches from large areas of white. Read the rest of this entry

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. Read the rest of this entry

As your Internet business grows, your free time will dwindle. Site changes will become time consuming and stressful. Automate your site and you can use your time for better purposes.
Automating
Automating a web site can cut out tedious tasks such as updating HTML, FTPing pages and changing site designs. Advanced automated web sites can send follow-up emails, send out newsletters, manage sales, do invoicing, track users visits and more. There is practically no function that can’t be accomplished.
There are many different types of automated web sites. Typically, the platforms break down into two categories, prepackaged or made to order. Automated web sites can range in complexity from simply using server side includes to full database driven sites. Server side includes are little snippets of code that allow content from one file to show on many pages. A database driven site, on the other hand, pulls content from an online database.
Web site information stored in an online database can be quickly and seamlessly inserted into many different types of templates. This becomes a huge time saver when you need to make a universal change to a web site. Depending on the system, the change can be made as a snippet of code or input directly into the database. Once entered, the regenerated site will carry the changes throughout the pages. In contrast, a non-automated site would require you to make changes to each individual page, a time wasting task. Let’s look at any example. Read the rest of this entry