by Candace S. McMorrow

Know you need a website, but have no idea where to start? This step-by-step guide will painlessly walk you through the process.

1. Register a Domain Name
   
   Domain Name: A meaningful, easy-to-remember "handle" for addressing computers and information on the Internet. Domain names typically end with a suffix that denotes the type or location of a resource (for instance, ".com" for commercial resources or ".ca" for resources based in Canada).
   
   Domain name prices start at just $10.50 per year with YourDomainRegistrar, a subsidiary of Identity Website Hosting, Inc.
   
   Beware of those registrars advertising $1.99 domains! More than likely, the price will increase at renewal time. Look at what is included for the price. Do your homework and compare.
   
   Choose a domain name that matches your company name or best describes your type of business. Check your spelling. The shorter the name, the better. A short name is easier for people to remember and to type.
   
   Need help choosing a domain? YourDomainRegistrar has a new tool called the Duke of URL. This tool will suggest available and premium domain names based on a word or phrase you provide.
   
   
2. Design Your Logo
   
   Easily design a professional logo by purchasing a logo template for less than $25 from Template-Candy.com.
   
   
3. Develop Your Website
   
   
   1. Define Your Goals
      
      The most important step in building your website is determining your goals. What do you want your website to do for you? Websites can do many things: provide customer service, sell products, promote services, gather information to generate leads, recruit employees, and more.
      
      Searching Yahoo! and Google for websites within your industry and for your competitors' sites will provide great ideas and develop a better understanding of the market and your competition within it.
      
      
   2. Write Your Content
      
      After defining the goals of your website, you now need to come up with a list of pages you want on your site. Pages may include a company overview, shopping cart, biographies of key personnel, industry information, blog, and submission form.
      
      Write the content for each of your pages. Remember, it doesn't have to be perfect. The beauty of a website is that you can easily update your content at any time.
      
      
   3. Build Your Website
      
      Now that you have written the content for your website, you are ready to build it.
      
      The big questions are 'Do you hire a designer?', 'Can you build it yourself?', 'Who will maintain the website?'
      
      With the tools available today, you can easily build and maintain the website yourself (see step 4 below). However, if you have time constraints, Identity Website Hosting can build your website for as little as $199!
      
      
4. Choose a Site Builder Plan
   
   Identity Website Hosting offers 3 different site builder applications — Trellix, EZ-Site, and dotMobi. All 3 are very easy to use.
   
   There's no software to download or install and no technical knowledge required. You can literally build a website in just a few minutes.
   
   Take the short questionnaire to help determine the best site builder application for your needs. You can even demo the product!
   
   
5. Promote Your Website
   
   
   1. Site Optimization
      
      The site needs to be built so that it is search engine friendly. The search engines need to be able to follow links throughout your website and determine the prominent information.
      
      The most important factor in search engine optimization is content — for search engines this means words and lots of them. The search engines look at the text on your pages (as well as the name of the page itself) for indexing.
      
      Avoid flash and frames pages as search engines cannot index them.
      
      In addition, it is critical that your site be designed with META tags.
      
      META Tags: Many search engines (including Yahoo! and Google) use META tags to index your Web pages. These tags include the description of your page and keywords relevant to the page. The description tag returns a description of the page in place of the summary the search engine would ordinarily create. The keywords tag provides keywords for the search engine to associate with your page.
      
      
   2. Search Engine Submission
      
      Once your site is optimized, submit it to more than 200 Search Engines/Directories including Yahoo! and Google for only $49.95.
      
      
   3. Reciprocal Links
      
      Links to your website provide traffic and can greatly improve search engine rankings.
      
      It's a fact, reciprocal links can make any site more important in the eyes of the search engines, and are often valued more highly than one-way links. But it is extremely important that the websites relate in either content or theme. Not just to the search engines, but to the people who visit.
      
      
   4. Paid Online Advertising
      
      Online advertising can take the form of pay-per-click campaigns and paid listings. These options should be considered carefully as they can get expensive.
      
      
   5. Printed Material
      
      Include your Domain Name on all marketing/print material such as letterhead, business cards, brochures, advertising, signage, and company vehicles.
      

by Candace S. McMorrow

How many hours a day do you spend sifting through your email trying to separate the legitimate from the spam?

Wouldn't you like to send a cyber torpedo to the spammer — give them a taste of their own nonsense? Alas, that is not an option.

The volume of unsolicited email being sent increases everyday. The reason: spamming remains economically viable. The spammer has no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable. Until there are enforceable laws in place, spammers are not going away.

Spam is more than just a nuisance. It is very costly. For the email provider, in order to cope with the deluge of spam hitting the servers, additional hardware and software must be purchased. Ongoing training of the support staff is required to stay on top of the latest trends.

For the individual user, costs such as lost productivity and fraud are incurred.

While it is impossible to totally eliminate spam, there are some ways to combat it.

Ray Everett-Church, cofounder and counsel for CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email), has 6 spam-fighting tips:

1. Don't reply to spam.
   
   
2. Don't post your email address on your website or in a newsgroup.
   
   This is very important! Spammers spider websites searching for email addresses to add to their database. By posting your email address on your website, you are guaranteed tons of spam!
   
   
3. Check a website's privacy policy before giving it your email address.
   
   
4. Use a spam filter.
   
   Even if your ISP (Internet Service Provider) or Web hosting company provides spam/virus protection, install your own. I recommend McAfee.
   
   If using Outlook and McAfee, you can setup your Rules Wizard to tag and distribute the spam.
   
   
5. Send the offender's full email header to SpamCop.
   
   The only way to track down the origin of a piece of spam is by analyzing the header information included in every email.
   
   The header information contains all kinds of information about the email message, including whom it's from and how it got into your mailbox.
   
   Many spammers try to disguise their identities and intentionally try to "fake" header information (called 'email spoofing') to make their spam emails untraceable.
   
   By providing the 'full' header information, the origin cannot be faked.
   
   
6. Never buy anything advertised in spam.

I have 2 more tips for those who use their own domain name:

1. Don't use a catch-all email address.
   
   Anything addressed to your domain name that is NOT setup as a separate POP or alias account, is, by default, automatically forwarded to the catch-all address.
   
   By setting up specific POP accounts and email aliases, and deleting your catch-all address, you will eliminate a lot of 'junk' mail.
   
   
2. Enable domain privacy (also called whois privacy) for your domain name.
   
   Domain privacy helps to significantly reduce the amount of unsolicited email and postal mail you receive because your personal contact information is not visible in the public WHOIS database.

Take heart. Implementing these tips will reduce the amount of spam you receive.