How to make a Maine website!

Alternative One (Personal Site)

DON'T spend any money (at least at first).  I would even suggest this for someone who is designing their own business site.  There are just two many places on the net offering great Free Hosting and Design Packages.  If you are going to be using the better software at some point don't you think you should be able to figure out these easy-building, free hosting sites?  At least get a site out there before going for the gold with that huge eCommerce site.

Here are a couple of mine: [new windows]

http://www.mp3.com/raypasnen
http://phentermine_online.tripod.com/

Yes. The URLs are longer and not as attractive to the eye but, take my word for it, you should be able to use one of these sites before trying to design your own from scratch.  Otherwise don't even try doing it using PageMill or FrontPage.

Go to: http://www.tripod.com/ and sign up for a free website.  Read the instructions.  All the answers are there.  Have questions?  Use the online help or drop me an email (ray@maineseek.com) , I'll try to help.

That's it.  Use that email address above and send me the link.  I'll add it to my ever expanding MaineSeek.com index.

more about this below...

The free hosts  show banners and other types of ads to your visitors.  They make money from each ad.  Otherwise there would be no reason for them to offer free hosting.  No problem.  These sites show up on the search engines.  They allow you to display anything: music, photos, stories, etc.  You can even accept accept credit cards as payment for products advertised.  Use PayPal.  We do.  It's free and you only need a checking account.

You can optimize your pages for inclusion in all the search engines.  Find out about it at my site about search engine optimization:  http://www.optimet.net/!

Do this before you try to figure out which program to buy for $199.00 (I use FrontPage 2002), which hosting company to use for up to $49.95/month (I'll host you for $7.95/month), where to register your domain name for up to $35.00/year (I use GoDaddy.com-$8.95/year), which merchant bank to register for credit card services at up to $199.00/year service charge and 25‰/charge.

You see.  There are a lot of things to consider before even thinking about starting to learn how new software runs.  Phew...

Alternative Two (Business Site)

DO spend money!  Don't think you are going to design an effective website right off the starting block.  You are not.  There is too much to learn and too much to un-learn.  You have to start looking at the world as a trend.  Everything must be perceived as a "keyword" or "keyphrase" in descending order of importance.  It can be done.  This site is testament to that, but, do you have hundreds of hours to learn to do it well?

Many of the sites listed in MaineSeek.com are created by non-professional web designers (including MaineSeek.com) and they look great.  But...  I can always tell when I'm looking at a site that cost a million bucks (http://www.google.com/) as easy as I can tell a site that cost nothing (http://www.bermudaseek.com/).
;-)  Don't worry, no one is being dissed.  BermudaSeek is mine, too.

There is a page here at MaineSeek.com called
Maine Internet - Web.
This page contains links to website designers in Maine.  It is my intention to (eventually) list a few reputable designers here on this page in the near future.

But... how do you find someone to design your site?

First.  Go here:  Maine Internet - Web.  Find some potential designers.  Any good designer will have a good listing on this page.  If it is not a good listing, do not enter the site.  These are the guys who may be designing your site.  If their listing looks bad here, yours will look bad at the search engines when they design your site.

Second.  Think about what you will need on your site.  Ask potential designers if they can do it.  You'll be asked (hopefully) to supply some enticing text to use on the site.  The webmaster will need a good bio or company description to use on your site.

Third.  Make sure that whoever you deal with, not only, design the site but...  sets up good hosting (NOT MORE THAN $15/MONTH), registers the domain in your name (NOT MORE THAN $15/YEAR), optimizes your pages (PAGES [all of 'em]) for inclusion in the search engines, submits them (all of 'em [pages]) to search engines and indexes.

These are all important steps.

Use OptiMet.net to optimize web pages for high search engine listings.