• Free hosting. The hosting service makes money from banner ads that they display on your Web site. Sometimes the storage space is too small and the monthly transfer allowance is usually limited.

• Shared hosting. Your Web site shares a server with many other Web sites. Some hosting providers put too many Web sites on each server, or someone else's Web site monopolizes the servers processor or bandwidth. This slows down your Web site.

• Dedicated hosting. The hosting provider sets up a separate server for your Web site alone. Whereas shared hosting can be acquired for as little as $5 per month, dedicated hosting cost hundreds of dollars per month.

Most small businesses can't afford a dedicated server. You can use your ISP's webspace or a free host for learning purposes, but usually only shared or dedicated hosting lets you use your own domain name. You will want to register and promote your own domain name, not put a lot of effort into promoting a domain name provided by a free host.

There are many Web host directories that let users rate web host providers. Visit several of these directories and choose a web host provider with a good rating. The most important specification to look for in a Web host provider is "up time". They should have a 99.9% up time guarantee.

2.Design and Build your Web site

A Web site is nothing more than a collection of webpages. Webpages are very similar to documents that you would create in a word processor. A word processor, like Microsoft Word for example, uses invisible "tags" to layout the page. Whereas Word uses "Rich Text File (RTF) tags, a webpage uses Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) tags. But the concept is the same.

You never actually see or deal with the tags in a word processor document. Many people use a web page design application that lets them avoid dealing with html tags on a webpage. But most serious webpage design requires you to deal with html code directly. There are three reasons why you would need to deal with the html code directly.

The first step in building your Web site is to create or choose a template. As I mentioned earlier, a Web site is nothing more than a collection of webpages. But all webpages for a Web site should have the same basic layout, color scheme, and navigation elements.

There are thousands of free and pay templates available on the Web. Actually, every Web site is a template that you can explore by selecting View | Source in your Web browser's menu. The most import thing about selecting a template is that you are comfortable with it. If the template uses complex code, the chances of getting an error occurring are high, and you may not be able to fix it.

Recommendation: Select a template you like, but don't use it directly. From the html coding that you learned by following my previous recommendation, hand code a similar template. Now you will have a template you understand and are comfortable modifying and fixing if it becomes necessary.

Generally, you will create webpages on your local computer and upload them to your Web site, usually using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Most web designers keep a local copy of their entire Web site on their local computer. Here they can test a webpage before uploading it to the live Web site. If your design uses active servers pages (ASP), you may want to install a Web server on your local computer for testing purposes.

3.Set up E-commerce E-commerce involves setting up shopping cart software and a means of accepting credit card payments. There are three possible ways to set up e-commerce:

Online payment services don't charge for setup or monthly fees, but the transaction fees are similar to a merchant account. Fees run about $0.35 and 2.5% per transaction. After a delay to prevent charge backs losses, you can login to the online payment services Web site and transfer the payment into your bank account.

The oldest and largest online payment service is PayPal which processes over 600,000 transactions per day.

4.Promote Your Web site

Unless someone makes a lucky guess as to the URL (Uniform Resource Locater) or address of your Web site, you will receive no visitors. Simply placing your Web site on the Internet does not result in traffic. You need to promote your Web site. There are many ways to promote your Web site, some free and some pay, some very effective, some a total waste of time. Below are the main methods of generating traffic.

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About The Author

To learn how to maintain your computer and use it more effectively to design a Web site and make money on the Web visit bucarotechelp.com. To subscribe to Bucaro TecHelp Newsletter visit http://bucarotechelp.com/search/000800.asp.