Adding Adsense to Google Sites is very easy and if you have a site on Google Sites then you probably already know how to do this. But for those who are curious I have explained how to add Adsense to a Google Site below.

Save your page, and then next to the Create Page and Edit page buttons you will see More Actions button. Clicking on it opens a menu, now select Manage Site.

In the left sidebar of the Site Manage page click on Monetize.

Now click on Montize this site button.

You will be asked whether you would like to create a new adsense account or Use an existing adsense account. If you do not have an adsense account you can create one now.

If you already have an adsense account provide your adsense account email address and pin/postal code or last five digits of the phone number that you have on your adsense account. Press next and you are done. now your adsense account will be used to display ads on your Google Sites pages. But first you will have to put the ads on.

Back to the Monetize page, you can select to display Adsense ads in the sidebar of all your pages. Doing this Adsense ads will appear in your sidebar after all your existing widgets like navigational links and recent activity. You can then edit your sidebar and move the Adsense to the top or between widgets.

You can also place your Adsense ads on individual pages by editing them and choosing AdSense from the Insert menu.

Google Sites will now ask you to choose the format and style of your ad and then you are done. Google Sites Help has a section on using Adsense on Google Sites, refer to it for information or use the comment form below to ask me I am not an expert but I will try to help.

There are several ways for a webmaster to notify the users about updates on their website. There are even free tools available that can publish an RSS feed for a static webpage (I haven’t used any of these and have no idea if they work with Google Sites or not). But since on this blog we rely heavily on the free tools provided by Google, so I will talk about using Google Groups as the solution.

Go to Google Groups and press the Create a group… button. On the Create a group page fill in the information about your site doing so your group and site will have same title and description. Under the option Choose an Access level, select Announcement-only and press the Create my group button. You will be then asked to verify by writing the letters shown in an image to prevent spam. Again press Create my group button. You will be then asked to add a few members to your new group. If you have the email addresses of people who would like to subscribe your group then paste them here or Skip this step.

Now you will be taken to your new group’s homepage. Copy the link from the address bar of your browser. Now go back to your Google Site. At the bottom of your sidebar you will see a link Edit sidebar, click it. On the next page click on Add a sidebar item. A popup will appear showing a few types of items you can add to your sidebar. Select Text and press ADD button. Now you will see a Text Box in your sidebar. Click on the edit link. In the popup window, Give it a title like “Newsletter” or “Subscribe” or “Mailing list”. Below provide the link to your newly created Google group with text informing visitors about your group.

The picture on your left shows how we have used the textbox on our sample website Bashir’s pet shop and notice how we have provided the link to the newsletter. Running a newsletter is no big deal, you can keep your subscribers updated about the recent changers you made to your web site, you can tell them about new products, share something useful with them and they will love you. See this page for some general email newsletter writing tips.

Content is the king on web. No one is going to spend more than a couple of seconds on a website if the content is not useful to them. According to a research, people don’t read pages they scan them when browsing the web and usually they make up their mind whether to stay or not with in few seconds. So you have just a few seconds to grab visitor’s attention and tell them that your page is useful for them. Placing the right content on right spots makes it easy for visitors to find the information quickly. So in this post we will discuss the content that most web surfers look for and where to place this content on your website.

• Introduce yourself. The importance of adding information about you and your business.
• Offer useful content. Detailed Information about your products and services.
• Stay in touch. Allow visitors to interact with you and the website easily.
• Keep it fresh. Content on the web is like vegetables in a grocery store. If its not fresh no one’s going to buy it.

Introduce Yourself

People are not stupid, they don’t just click on a link and order the product. People who buy things on the web are actually a lot smarter than people who visit your shop/store/or offices. They will look for who you are and how good you are. So why not you just tell them all this, and then a little more. Add an about us page to your website and tell your visitors who you are, what you do and how good you are at it. For example

“Bashir’s petshop is a small store located in thesmalltown, smallstate. We sell and supply pet food, accesories, clothing and jewelry. We can take care of your pets when you are on vacations or away for business. We are in the business since last 15 years and have a very good reputation among the residents of thesmalltown ask your neighbours if you don’t believe us. We have a very friendly staff and we love to meet new people. Come visit us at the store, join our mailing list or drop us an email.”

Offer Useful Content

In an earlier post for this series we made a plan to create our website where we tried to define goals for our website. For example our main goal was to sell our products/ services. So the products and the services go directly to your main page. Yes it is a good idea to create a section for product listings with separate page for each product. But since our main goal is to sell these products we are looking for visitors who come to our site looking for these products. And if they don’t find it quickly on main page they might move away without digging product catalogs. (Click on the image below to see a sample layout)

A sample site layout for a small business website

Now there should be a page for your products and services. Make sure it is easy to navigate. Prices are visible easily. Then each product should have its separate page. Provide as much detail as possible and don’t forget to add images of the product. If you already have a happily satisfied customer base ask them to write reviews for your products or services on your website. Also make sure that your potential customers can compare your product/services to your competitor’s.

All these things make your content useful for your site’s visitors. Tell them more and more about your offerings because thats what they came looking for. Keep your content focused on your goals, keep it information driven, keep it fresh and you have yourself a website with useful informative content.

Stay in Touch

This is a common mistake that most small businesses make. They do not provide enough ways for their site’s visitor to interact with the website, the business and the people behind it. If people don’t interact with the website then they are not good for your business. So please add a contact page. Your contact page should have a feedback form, email address, address of your locations, telephone and fax numbers.

You will also see that many popular websites which sell products or services have a comment form at the end of each product listing. Use it to allow your visitors to ask questions on the product page directly, to submit their user reviews and or offer some advise to other visitors. You can also get in touch with your site’s visitors by adding a company blog, a wiki, forum, mailinglist, etc.

Keep it Fresh

The difficult part is not to create the perfect website. The difficult part if to keep improving it. You can keep improving your website doing two things:

Update your site with new content as frequently as possible.

Many small businesses fail to do well on the web because they don’t realize the importance of the content. For example a small home appliances shop has a website with the images of an old television set that every one has already bought and after an year there is nothing attractive about it. The same shop could have done better if they kept updating their website with images of new items in their stocks. Like showing a picture of giant LCD screen for home theatre.So if you keep posting new items to your website it remains fresh and attractive to visitors. Post new offers, special discounts, or links to other webpages with interesting articles about your products.

Experiment with the layout of your website. Web design is a complex field. Sometimes a layout and design that works best for a pet store wouldn’t work for a music store. So you should continuously make changes to your site’s design and see what works best for you. Use different layouts, color schemes, fonts. Change the position of your content. Install a stat counter on your website and see what your visitors are looking for and then add the links to this information on your main page and link to your main page on your most visited pages. You will learn this skill on your way. It is actually fun and very addictive once you realize that the last change you made increased page visitors, you seek more ways to bring more visitors.

This post is part of a series. To read more posts from this series go to “Creating a Small Business Website“.

Content Management System (CMS) is an application or a software used to create, edit, manage and publish content in a consistently organized fashion. We will be using one to manage our small business website. Those used to manage content on the web are called Web CMS. These are usually web applications. Which means that the software resides on your web server. It handles the appearance of your website, organizes your content and serves it in HTML when some one visits your website. Most open source and free CMS use PHP for scripting and MySQL database.

Why CMS?

You can create a web site by simply using a text editor to create your own HTML documents. Even for people with good HTML knowledge it is a lot of work to copy paste the same code on all pages to maintain consistency, check the website for broken links and manually update the navigational structure of the website. Why spend time on that? When you can spend the same time on creating the content.

• Using a CMS your site has the same look and feel and you manage site’s design with templates. So your pages have a consistent feel which is good for branding your website.
• Creating and publishing new content is easier as you will not have to worry about HTML and navigational structure of your website. Most CMS show your newest content on the main page and since they serve the pages dynamically so all your documents get updated with new content.
• You can add new users to work with you on the same site. You can set their roles and manage the content they add.
• Using a CMS allows you to give your site’s visitors a place to interact without breaking your site. Visitors can comment, join mailing list or take part in forums.

Which CMS is right for me?

There are many applications available and a great number of them are free open source CMS. You choose the one that meets your needs. What you should look when choosing the right CMS for your website:

• Does it have the features that help you publish your site the way you want. For example if you want to create an online store, wordpress which is a great CMS is porbably not the best choice in your case. But then if you want to create your main page with news and articles then wordpress is definitely a good choice.
• Does it have the ability to extend functionality using plugins or modules. Using plugins and modules you can add extra functionality and features to your website without breaking it.
• It has a template system that is easy for you to understand. Are there many free templates available on the web? This is important so that you can pick a well coded template that you can modify with your own branding.
• Support, does it have a well written manual available on the web? Is there a forum, mailing list, or a chatroom where you can go and ask questions.

There are many Free and Open Source CMS available on the web. They come with great community support, plugins, templates and themes. WordPress is probably the most popular example of an Open Source CMS. If you want a more e-commerce CMS then you can try Zen Cart or SilverStripe. You can also use more than one CMS on your site, for example you can use WordPress for your static pages and company blog, PHPbb for your web forum, and Zen Cart for your product gallery. Many web hosts offer one click installs for these popular open source CMS. You can also download and install them on your web server and play with them for a while before making your final decission.

Create Your Web Site

Now that you have decided to create your website with any CMS. Next step is to modify the default installation. First of all you need to change the logo, site’s name and title, design and layout to meet your needs. Most Open Source CMS has web forums, mailing lists, tutorials and Wikis on their websites with details about modifying your site. For example look at WordPress support pages, zen-cart tutorials, phpbb documentation and support, SilverStripe community support.

This is a great skill you are learning yourself and once you are familiar with the support system of open source community you will feel powerful and confident. Now lets say you want to change the header image of the default installation with your company’s logo, you go to your CMS website and look for tutorial to do that. If you don’t find a tutorial then simply ask in forums or mailing list. Some one will answer your question with in a couple of hours sometimes even in minutes.

Don’t rush to launch and announce your website until it is ready. Keep modifying your website, work on it, browse it, fill it with content, add plugins and try different layouts. Take your time, take a week atleast or a month if you are a perfectionist. Once you are satisfied with the look and functionality of your website launch it as “Beta” which means that product if polished but you are still testing it. After a while when you have enought users and you have resolved most issues with the website you can remove the Beta label.

In the next posts we will be discussing the content you should publish on your website and how you will be working to make your website popular.

This post is part of a series. To read more posts from this series go to “Creating a Small Business Website“.

There are thousands of companies out there offering cheap and affordable web hosting but not all of them are good. It is important that you go with a company that offers reliable and affordable web hosting. Then again, they all claim to be reliable and affordable, how do you find out?

I go for word of mouth. I was working on a small website for an NGO and my agreement with them included web hosting and domain name registration. Normally I go for DreamHost which has proven itself very reliable to me. But a friend of mine had used Bluehost recently so he suggested that I should give them a try. I did and I have found another reliable and cheap webhosting solution. But you shouldn’t just go for what your friends say, make sure that you do check out reviews and packages before buying them.

First of all you should never go for the advertising jargon most web hosting companies use on their websites. Instead, you should carefully monitor their offerings. Compare packages and read their descriptions carefully. There might be some words that would confuse you but don’t worry lookup for them in web hosting glossary or search the web. While comparing packages you should pay attention to:

1. Bandwidth and Disk space. To make sure that it meets your needs. If you are going to upload lots of audio video files on your website than you need more bandwidth and disk space. But since hardware is becoming cheaper every day so all good web hosts offer quite enough disk space and bandwidth for a medium sized popular website to run swiftly.
2. Do they offer you to add additional domains and subdomains. This is important because at some point you might want to add additional domains and subdomains. like for example you might want to add an extra customer services website under your main site. If they do not offer you to do that freely than they are a bad web host. Dreamhost offers me to add as many domains and subdomains as i want to my existing hosting package.
3. How many email addresses they offer. You might need this if you start offering email accounts to your clients or staff.
4. Do they run latest PHP/MySQL. Since you will be using a CMS and most open source CMS use PHP and MySQL and most web hosts support PHP and MySQL. But some lazy web hosts use older versions which might cause you trouble while installing or upgrading your CMS.
5. What support options they offer. do they have help pages, do they offer email and phone support. You should make sure that help is available whenever you need it.

You can find answers to all these questions on their website but if its not there you should email them for the answers. I would say that you should email them any way because it tells you how quickly they respond to user queries. Ask them questions and make sure that they satisfy you with their answers. If they don’t then move on to the next web host.

After that you should check out forums such as Webmaster World and Ozzu Web Master forum. These forums have sections for web hosting related discussions where you can ask other web masters to advise you chosing the right host. Most probably someone has already used their services and you can hear from the users directly how they found the services. There are also many websites around that offer user submitted reviews of web hosts. Web Hosting Geeks is one such site.

Web Hosting and Domain Registration are two different things. There are many web hosts that offer free domain registration for your hosting period. But some times a Domain is not included in your web hosting package. I would say that you go for the web host that offers Domain Registration with hosting, but if your prefered web host does not offer this then you will have to register a domain name elsewhere and then redirect it to your web server. It is very simple and most of the time your web host will assist you with that.

Or if you want, I have connections with Dreamhost and I can talk them to offer you a special deal as an special Easy Life subscriber. Drop me an email if you want the details.

I have carefully handpicked a few webhosts some of them I have used personally and others are considered reliable in the market. But you are once again advised to review the offerings and package details to make sure that you are buying the right services.

• DreamHost: This website is hosted with Dreamhost. We have used them and found them very reliable. They have great customer support with wikipages and user forums, you can also email them, or telephone them. They offer unlimited diskspace, bandwidth, add your own domain names and subdomains, unlimited email accounts.
• Bluehost: They also offer unlimited diskspace and bandwidth and enough email accounts and mysql databases. They have good support options and I have used them for a client once and my clients are satisfied with their services.
• Yahoo! Web Hosting: Yahoo web hosting for small businesses is just as reliable as it gets. It is a little more expansive than the previous two hosts but they have great features to justify the price tag.
• AN Hosting: They are in the market since 2001, they offer you reliable installation and upgrades to many popular content management systems such as wordpress, joomla, drupal, b2evolution, etc. You add 20 additional domain names, 500 GB disk space, 5000 GB bandwidth and unlimited MySql databases.

 
All above mentioned hosting services also offer one free Domain Name registration with their hosting packages. Remember that you should do your homework before signing up with any webhost including those listed above. Let me know if you found some other reliable web host and we will add them to this list here.

This post is part of a series. To read more posts from this series go to “Creating a Small Business Website“.

It is an old technique but still effective, get a pen or pencil and a peice of paper and write down your plan. Since we are talking about putting your ideas on the paper, have you ever heard about mind mapping? Though mind mapping is not the topic of discussion here but since I found out how useful it is, I can not stop myself from advising others to give it a try. Back to our discussion, so when you are writing down your plan for the website make sure that It has the following:

1. What you want to do.
2. Do you know how to do it.
3. Your budget.
4. Your long term goal.

You can think about other aspects and ask yourself other questions too. I am not asking you to answer these questions. You can answer them if you want to but just writing them down is also enough to help you understand your position and it will help you achieve your goals more effectively.

What I want to do with my website?

Lets say if you have a small pet shop. You would probably want to do the following with your website.

1. Advertise your shop to new customers.
2. Make an online customer base.
3. Sell your expertise.

You might have different ideas and products to sell. You should be clear about what you want to do with your website and there is no better way than to write down.

How I am Going to do this?

After that you should ask yourself how you are going to do this. By this we mean that do you have the expertise to do that, is your idea technically feasible, are there online resources available to help you achieve your goal which we described in last paragraph. Don’t worry if you don’t have the expertise yet, or if you think your idea is technically difficult to achieve. Web is a great place to learn, you will find free expert advise on almost every topic. But we are writing it down so that we know where we stand.

How much money I can spend on my website?

Now that you know what you want to do and have thought about how to do it. lets think about the costs. The cost of creating a website depends on how you are going to use it. If your plan requires you to host lots and lots of audio and video files then you will need to spend more money on web hosting and bandwidth. If you want to purchase things rather than using the free tools available then your costs would be even higher. A couple of hundered dollars are ok to get you started with a business website. This estimate includes web hosting charges and domain registration and you will be using free tools to achieve your goal.

What are my long term goals?

In the end write down how you want to see your website growing up. Where you want to see it after an year or so. Write down your long term goals in sales or daily visitors to your website. Write about how you want to become from just an ordinary pet shop owner to a web celeberity. Be creative and feel free to write about your idea of success. It is going to keep you motivated and will also help you stay focused during your journey.

Now make a copy of this paper and save the original one in somewhere hidden from your view. We will look into this document after an year and see how much you have achieved. The working copy would keep you motivated and on the track.

This post is part of a series. To read more posts from this series go to “Creating a Small Business Website“.

There are lots of people out there with great ideas that they want to sell on the web. But they can’t do it because they think they don’t have the expertise and money required to do that. Well folks you were wrong, you don’t need neither much expertise nor much money to sell your ideas or products on the web. This series of posts will help you get started with your wonderful online journey.

Since its going to be a little lengthy discussion so we are breaking it into topics. I will update the links below once they are published.

1. Do you have a Plan?
2. Finding the right web host.
3. Choosing a Content Management System and its usage.
4. What you should put on your website.
5. How to sell products/ services or add a shopping cart to your website.
6. The importance of updating your site frequently.
7. How to make your small business web site popular.

 

The purpose of this series is not to make you an expert in web development. These posts tell you that how you can create a simple business web site on your own without spending much time on learning new things. It gives you a solid start and then you can improve on your skills. Believe me or not, but there is a lot of people out there who started their successful business ventures by just reading something like this on the web. I am one of such people, one day I was reading a blog post about how to start a blog and the other day I was blogging myself. Later on I created many blogs, and one of them is currently my main source of income. I hope you like this series and I would appreciate if you ask questions and leave comments so that we can improve this little tutorial and make it better.

There are thousands of small business owners who don’t know how they can benefit from the web. They do not have the skills, and their budget does not allow them to hire professionals for the job. In this post we will discuss how small businesses can take advantage of the web by creating simple small website with all the functionality of big websites. We will be using Google Sites, which is a part of the web based application suit called “Google Apps”. With Google sites you can create professional looking websites witout any knowledge of HTML.

1. Sign up for Google Sites and press the Create site button.
2. Now you will be shown a form where you can provide information about your new website.
3. In the site name field you can use your business name example “Bashir’s Pet Shop”.
4. In the description field describe your business example “We supply pet food, accessories for your dogs, cats, birds and fish”.
5. Make sure that the Mature Content box is unchecked.
6. Share with: “Every one in the world can view this site”.
7. Select a theme for your website. You can change it later if you want to.
8. Type the code shown and press the Create site button.

Now Google will create a site for you with a page called Home and you will be taken to an interface where you can create new pages and edit old pages. Press the Edit Page button to edit your Home page and fill it with information about your site. Using this interface is like using a Word processor. You can insert pictures, create tables, link to other pages, and write as much as you want. This is your site’s main page so it would be better if you describe the services and products your business offers in simple words. You can create new pages for each service or product afterwards. Press the Save button.

Congratulations! You have created yourself a website with a home page. But there should be other pages in this website, or else it would look boring. So you add a new page by pressing “Create new page” button. There are different kind of pages you can create. A simple web page good for text that you don’t need to change very often, for e.g. a “Contact” page with information about your business’s location, phone number and email address. Google Sites also has a feature called “Announcements”. Using it you can create a page where you can post latest updates and news about your small business. You can also create a “List” page or a file cabinet page.

Once you have created a few pages that effeciently describe your business. Click on “Edit Sidebar” under your sidebar on bottom left corner. Here you can change your sidebar, we recommend that you change your Navigation so that it shows all your pages.

We have created a Sample site for you. Look how we have changed the sidebar. We have added pages to navigation. One of these pages “Recently” contains announcements, “Price List” page has a list of prices of items sold, we have added a contact page too.

Using Google Sites you can create an almost perfect looking website. However there is a problem. Your site’s URL would be something like this: http://sites.google.com/site/yoursitename This is not a very professional looking address for a good and reliable business like yours. But don’t worry, You can use Google sites with your own domain name. For that you first need a domain name. You can register a domain name from popular sites such as GoDaddy or NetworkSolutions. You don’t need to buy hosting since your site is already hosted on Google servers. After you have registered your domain name, go back to your Google Sites control panel open your site and on top right you will see Site Settings link. Click on it and go to Web Address tab. Now under the Add a web address write down your domain name e.g. www.example.com. Now remember that you must own the domain and have access to change the CNAME records. Read this page from Google Sites support for information on how to set your domain name to work with Google sites.

If this sounds difficult to you, then you can try Dream Host, which offers webhosting and domain name registration services for as low as $6.99 per month. They also offer you to enable Google Apps by default when signing up for their service. Using Google Apps with your own domain. This way you can not only create a wonderful website using Google Sites, you can also use gmail, Google Docs, and many other wonderful google applications with your own domain name. It also gives you the power to add new users who can work on pages, this way you can add your staff and colleagues to update website. We recommend Dreamhost because this website is hosted on Dream host too and we think that they are very reliable webhost for newbies.

After you have created your wonderful website for your soon-going-to-be-big small business, there are other things that you can do with your website. Things that will make visitors come again and again to your website. For example you can create a mailing list for your website using Google Groups, and then add a subscribe option on your sidebar. This way you can send newsletter to your sites visitors and customers. You can track visitors using Google Analytics, Promote your website using Google Adwords, Add videos to your website from Youtube, Add contact forms, survey and polls using Google Docs Forms, The sky is the limit when it comes to what you can do with your small website.
Please let us know if you found this guide useful and tell us about the sites you have created using Google Sites.