8:  Building your website within minutes

The concept with online business is pretty much straight forward.  You make your website earn money for you by providing valuable information/service to others and earning revenue through the traffic you generate to your website.  It all sounds too easy; however people find things difficult when they actually start building there website.  Sometimes it is too technical, other times it is too complex to deal with.  If you are one such person, relax …. there is nothing to worry about.  The secret behind building your website in minutes is CMS or Content Management Systems. 

A content management system is the website software that lets you build a website without knowing any web programming skills, such as HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL and such.  Once familiar with the software you have chosen, you can easily customize the layout, look and feel, video files, … with ease.  What’s more, most of the content management software are free to use.  

Before you start looking out for CMS, you need to precisely define why you are creating a website.   You also need to define what you and your visitors going to do on your website (e.g., do you want to publish articles, do you want to have a blog, do you want a forum, any classified sections, etc.).  Based on your requirement, you might want to go with the one which fulfills all your requirements. 

Good enough, are you ready to start?  Where exactly do you look out for CMS?

www.cmsmatrix.org is a good place to look out for – use the search feature in the site and you will almost always find out what you require.  The other site where you can find tons of information is www.opensourcecms.com - they have good collection of information, spend some time browsing through these sites and you will learn all about CMS.  Also try searching in your favorite search engine using the keywords “how to choose a CMS”, … and you will find more details. 

Before going with a particular CMS, you might want to consider the following

• How easy it is for you to use the CMS
• How easy it is for the people to access the site
• Are you able to edit/upload the content easily.  Are the pages search engine friendly
• How flexible is the CMS to incorporating new module into it
• Does the CSS have adequate support/help desk

CMS offers several advantages over traditional way of building a website

• CMS will save you ample time.  One of the biggest advantages of using CMS is that it will save your precious time updating/editing the website.  Once familiar with the software, you can update the content of the website within minutes.  Even major changes such as incorporating a new feature, changing the look of the websites, etc. can be done in no time. 
• Dynamic site:  Using a CMS means that your website becomes a dynamic information medium versus a static brochure type webpage.  Content can be updated on a regular daily basis by assigned persons with secure login i.d. and password.
• Extensive support from the community:  Many of the CMS softwares are open source and hence they were able to build strong community of programmers, web developers, designers, etc.  It is like the worlds best minds coming together to help you out with your website building.  Almost all your technical questions will be answered by any one of them, so you can be rest assured that even if you face some heck-ups there will be some one to help you out
• Numerous additional modules are available for various functions.  You can find almost all the features with the additional modules which are added quite often by the developers. 
• Most CMS also does well in terms of search engines

If you are a non-tech savvy person, then CMS is the way to go.  It will help you to build your website in no time,  and offers several advantages over traditional way of building your site.  Make good use of the CMS and have fun with this online business.