Now that you’ve created your own Web site and possibly your own Blog or RSS feed, it’s time to make the most of your new online presence. If you are an expert Web designer, and like to do your own coding, you are free to start building your site as you see fit. However, most of us probably don’t want to take the time to build everything from scratch, so many people are tempted to turn to pre-created content that can be embedded directly into their Web sites in the form of widgets or gadgets – little snippets of HTML codes that can add customizable Web modules or enhanced functionality to the site. You have to be willing to make changes to the HTML codes of your pages to add any of these little widgets, so if you aren’t familiar with writing HTML codes or aren’t willing to experiment, this post may not really be for you.

There are a nearly unlimited number of widgets and gadgets that can be embedded into your site to quickly turn your blank page into a rich, eye-catching, content-filled page for your visitors. Most of these widgets will provide you with the necessary instructions for inserting the appropriate codes into your Web page, so I won’t go into the details here. Although it might seem intimidating at first, there are some ways to make it easier. If you are using Microsoft Office Live Basics, you can use the Page Editor to add small snippets of HTML codes anywhere you want to on your page quite easily. Please note, however, that if the widget code you are trying to embed should contain the “<iframe>” code to work on your site. If it contains a “<script>” tag in it, it probably will not work. I’ll discuss this in a little more detail at the end of today’s post, and provide a possible workaround if you really need to use a particular script-based widget.

One of the first places many people start is with an online advertising service, like Google’s AdSense program. These programs allow you to insert advertisements into your Web site, and offer you money for generating traffic to the advertisers’ Web sites. Although this might sound like a dream come true at first, there are a few things to keep in mind. For one thing, if you blanket your Web site with advertisements, people will not be likely to visit often. In addition, your new Web site is very unlikely to generate enough traffic to turn this into a sufficient revenue stream. Until and unless you can bring a lot of traffic to your site, you probably won’t make a penny by offering up advertisements on your site. There’s nothing wrong with including advertisements on your site, but that’s probably not the reason you wanted to start your Web site to begin with, so try not to loose your focus with dreams of big money from advertising.

There are countless other embeddable widgets available online, and the tendency is to use too many of them on your site. Your pages should all focus on relevant content for that page, rather than a hodgepodge of someone else’s design elements. However, if you can find an embeddable widget for your site that complements the site or serves your viewers purposes, it can be a great benefit to your site.

Aside from Google’s AdSense program, Zoho offers a variety of embeddable widgets. Zoho Creator, for example, allows you to build Web applications to collect, edit, or display database-style information on your Web site. This can be a great way to collect information about your users by allowing them to post comments, register for a membership, sign up for e-mail newsletters, or other tidbits you might offer in exchange for a glimpse at who is viewing your site. Other Zoho applications include Writer, Sheet, and Show – which are Web-based document, spreadsheet, and slideshow applications. One nice feature about Zoho Show is that you can embed your presentation directly into your Web site. Zoho Challenge and Zoho Polls allow your viewers to vote for candidates (up to 25 candidates with a free account) or respond to polls you post on your site. All of these widgets are aimed at making your site much more interactive to your viewers. Be warned, however, that too much interactivity may turn some people off, depending on the nature of your site. No matter what you add to your site, remember to Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS).

There are a wide variety of widgets you can add related to your Blog. For example, Feedburner offers you the ability to post your subscription stats, create animated gifs that show off your latest posts, and offer people the option to subscribe to your Blog via e-mail instead of a feed reader/aggregator. In addition, MyBlogLog allows people to put their personal profile on your Blog to join your “community.” This can be a great way to cross-promote your blog with someone else.

Unless you are creating widgets to share with others, your Web site should probably not focus primarily on cool little widgets. Use them wisely, and only when they add a definite benefit to your site, not just because they are “cool” or “new” or otherwise interesting. The more external resources you add to your page, the longer it will take to load, and the less room you’ll have for the “real” content you want to display on your site.

 
An important note about Microsoft Office Live Basics
If you haven’t been reading this blog, Microsoft Office Live Basics is a free Web site hosting and domain name registration program. While the price is definitely right, there is something very important to note about how Web pages created with this service respond to attempts to embed external widgets in your site.

Unless your widget can be embedded in an iframe, it will not work on your Office Live Basics site. Any external scripts (and even many scripts from your own site), in my experience, simply do not work on your Office Live Basics site. The best I can figure is that the tracking scripts Microsoft Office Live Basics serves up in all of your pages (to keep track of your page views, visitor information, and other traffic monitoring services) interfere with any external scripts you write ( Your guess is as good as mine whether this is intentional or unintentional on the part of Microsoft). I have not been able to find any workarounds to this problem directly, but there is one alternative way to use external scripts on your site hosted by Microsoft Office Live, if it’s important enough to you. It takes a willingness to go in and modify the HTML codes for the pages, so some familiarity with HTML and/or JavaScript is a plus. Here’s what you do…

• Create a blank page using the Page Designer in your Microsoft Office Live Basics account.
• View the resulting page in your Web browser.
• View the source code for the page (For IE6/7 or Mozilla Firefox: right-click on the page and choose “View => Source” or “View => Page Source”).
• Copy the source code and past it into a plain text editor.
• Look for a section of code near the bottom that is marked with <!–BEGIN TRACKING CODE–>. Remove everything from this tag to the tag marked <!–END TRACKING CODE–>.
• Save the file in plain text format (Not as .rtf, .doc, .odt). Use the “Save as Type” field to choose to save the file as a plain text (.txt) file. However, you should save the file with the “.htm” “.html” or “.aspx” extension.

You now have a blank template to use to create your own Web pages, which can safely include external scripted content. Unfortunately, you cannot edit this page using the Office Live page editor. You will have to edit it offline by writing your own codes or using a program like the free Web editor, Nvu (pronounced “n-View”), to edit the page. You can then upload the page to your Office Live site using the Document Gallery tool.

It’s a fairly complex procedure, so you should really only do this if you absolutely have to embed these external scripts in your page. As a general rule, it is probably better to use iframes to embed these widgets on your page. However, there are some times when this just won’t work well because iframes need to have a specific width and height on your page, so it’s a good idea to keep this as a backup plan for that page that just has to include some sort of external script.

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Brought to you by Lockworld Herald.

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Now that you have successfully created your own personal Web site for your self, your family, or your small business, it is time to expand your reach. If you are using Microsoft Office Live Basics to create and maintain your site free of charge, you will quickly realize that there are certain key Web features that are not really offered through this free service. Two of the most important of these key features are the ability to create a blog or other RSS feed, and the ability to restrict access to certain portions of your site.

RSS feeds: Keep your visitors coming back for more
One of the most common ways to expand the reach of your Web site is to offer an RSS feed. This can be in the form of a blog, such as this one, in which you share your ideas, thoughts, opinions, etc. Alternatively, it could be in the form of an update about your site. For example, you can create an RSS feed to notify subscribers about new products you offer, news about your site or your services, or other content modifications related to your site. People can subscribe to your feed to keep informed about what’s happening with your site, or your latest thoughts and ideas.

Sadly, Microsoft Office Live does not offer a specific blogging feature, so you will have to find some other solution for your blog. If you plan on doing a lot of extensive writing/editing, and you need to have a very powerful and flexible blogging tool, I’d recommend Blogger.com, although there are many other options for creating a blog (http://www.wordpress.com/, http://www.sampasite.com/, and countless others). Of course, the disadvantage to any of these options is that your blog will not be hosted on the personalized Web site you just created.

On the more technical side, both Blogger and WordPress offer a feature that allows you to embed your blog within your own Web domain (so, for example, I could change the URL of this blog to “TheWebForYou.LockworldHerald.com” and continue to use Blogger.com as my blogging tool), but unfortunately this requires altering the CNAME directory of your Web site, which is not permitted if you registered your site free through Office Live Basics.

Depending on your needs, this may or may not be a problem. If you just want to establish a Web presence for yourself or your family members, it’s probably not unreasonable to offer two alternative Web sites (one for your primary Web site, and one for your blog). In addition, if you are using your blog to share your thoughts/ideas (as opposed to product information and updates, or company news) with the world, it’s not unreasonable to host the blog outside of your primary Web site. However, if you are starting your own business or using your RSS feed to notify your subscribers about new content or changes to your site, it may seem to be a bit unprofessional to host your blog or RSS feed on a site outside of your primary Web site, especially if you are creating an RSS feed to drive traffic TO your Web site.

It takes a little bit of creativity, but it is possible to host a blog using Microsoft Office Live Basics. However, you will either have to write the XML yourself (for the advanced user) or use a feed-generating program to create the RSS feed codes in a local file (for the novice to intermediate user). You can then upload this file to your Office Live Basics site. Every time you want to update your feed, however, you will have to log in to your Office Live Basics account, delete the old XML file, and upload the new one (with the same filename, of course). It’s a little bit awkward, but it will work. There are countless RSS-type feed generating programs available, in every shape and size. To get started, you might want to try FeedSpring, from Usable Labs. This is a fairly simple tool to create your feed content, and is available free of charge. Although it is designed primarily to upload the completed feed via FTP file-transfer (like most feed-generation programs), it can be used to create a local XML file containing your feed, which can be uploaded as needed to your Office Live Basics site. If portability is your preference, you might want to try ListGarden, a free, small stand-alone application that can be run directly from a flash drive to create and edit your feed. You can create and edit your feed using ListGarden, and publish the resulting RSS/XML or HTML file to a local folder on your computer (or flash drive) to upload to your Office Live site whenever you need to.

Although I don’t have time to go into details here, you might consider using Feedburner.com to “burn” your feed. This means that people who subscribe to your feed will do so through FeedBurner. In return, FeedBurner will offer you some general statistics, such as the (estimated) number of subscribers to your feed and other useful statistics. You can also offer your Feed as an e-mail subscription through FeedBurner. There are many other useful services FeedBurner offers…if you’re going to produce an RSS feed or blog, they are definitely worth checking out.

Restricted Access: Show your clients or friends that you appreciate them by offering them more than the general public
Another way to expand your Web reach, surprisingly, is to protect your content from public views. Again, this is not something offered by Microsoft Office Live Basics. Unlike the RSS feeds, I don’t know of any way to make it work within the new Web site you created with your Office Live Basics subscription. It can be done, however, by using an external free resource, such as SampaSite.com. Although it would be best to keep everything on one site, you probably won’t be able to do that until you’re willing to shell out the cash for your own customized Web hosting solution. If you’re on a budget, you may just have to make the sacrifice and create a separate Web site at SampaSite to host your protected/restricted content.

While it may sound strange to think that restricting access to your site’s content can help you expand your reach, I can think of a few ways that it can help you. For one thing, you may want to create a virtual split-personality. While it might be OK for you to create a strong, publicly-accessible Web presence, you may not want to put your personal or family information out there on the Web for just anyone to view. However, you may very well want to share this information with your friends and family members. By creating a protected presence on the Web, you will be able to share both your public and your private details with the appropriate audiences.

Alternatively, business owners may want to restrict access to certain information, files, or other resources to paying customers or registered users. This can be a way to encourage people to create accounts on your site (and maybe agree to receive your business advertisements/updates) or purchase your products or services. If you can protect your sensitive materials from unauthorized use, you can potentially offer more options to your visitors/subscribers. For example, you may want to follow an increasingly popular trend and offer people access to all of your protected content for a monthly or yearly fee. Or you may want to entice people to stay involved in your site by offering them access to information that is not publicly accessible if they agree to receive periodic announcements from you about new products or services you offer. The limits of what you can do with your public vs. private Web features is limited only by your imagination and business sense.

Freebies: You can do a lot with a little bit
We will be talking about a wide variety of free services that can be used in connection with your free Office Live Basics Web site. This post focused primarily on external resources, but over the next few months, we will discuss a variety of free resources that can be embedded directly into your site. In fact, I’ll show you how to build your own e-commerce application to allow you to sell products or services through your Web site to anyone, and even to collect payments online. Although we’ll use a variety of resources, we will focus pretty extensively on the Zoho line of Web tools, particularly Zoho Creator, which will allow you to build basic Web applications to create, edit, and/or display information to your visitors. We will use Zoho Creator to create a basic application to collect information about your visitors (perhaps to sign up for e-mail newsletters), as well as to create an online catalog of products or services which can be purchased directly from your Web site.

That’s all for today. You already have an idea of where I’m going with this blog over the next few months. The next post will be fairly important, as I’ll discuss how to embed external content in your Web site. In some cases, this is not very difficult, but in others it can cause problems with certain aspects of the Office Live Basics Web site you’ve created. I’ll warn you of some of the potential pitfalls you may encounter, and I’ll show you some workarounds I’ve discovered.

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Brought to you by Lockworld Herald.

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If you’ve been following along with this blog, you’ve already thought about whether you need to establish a presence on the Web, thought about some of the options for creating a personal Web page, and have decided on your online identity. Now, you’re ready to build your very own Web site with your own custom domain name.

Registering your own unique domain name allows you to secure your place on the Internet. Although there are a wide variety of domain name registration services out there, you can generally expect they will share two things in common:

• Annual charge to register/maintain your domain name: Just to “reserve your space” on the Web, you will probably have to shell out some money to register a domain name. This is a recurring fee you will have to pay every year to ensure that you can keep your domain name. This registration fee, typically around $15/year, will not provide you with a Web site. Instead, it just reserves the name so no one else can claim it.

• Monthly charge to host your Web site: Once you have a domain name registered, it will be up to you to create and update your own Web site. Unless you are prepared to set up a Web server in your own home or business, this will mean paying someone else a monthly fee to host your Web site, varying from $20 – $199/month, depending on your needs. Hosting, in general, means that they will allow you to store your files on their computers, and their computers will provide the gateway for people to view your Web pages.

Both of these fees are very legitimate and very reasonable. By requiring people to pay for their domain names, they ensure that no one can just come along and snatch up all of the best domains and never put anything on them. Companies who provide hosting services are buying and maintaining their computer systems with the money they generate from the monthly hosting fees.

However, these fees typically make it difficult for people to start a Web site for their very small business or their own personal use.

Fortunately for all of us, Microsoft has recently unveiled a new service, called “Microsoft Office Live” that provides both domain name registration and Web site hosting services. There are several different levels of services provided, but I will only discuss the “Microsoft Office Live Basics” service. This service is absolutely free of charge, and allows you to register your own domain name and build your own custom Web site.

Although I’ve already discussed several options for creating a free Web page, if you’re really serious about building a strong Web presence, you probably want a Web page with your own unique domain name, especially if you don’t have to pay anything! This is an absolutely amazing service, and I recommend you give it a try. No, Microsoft is not paying me for this blog (although if anyone from Microsoft is reading this, I will gladly accept any donations!). I’m just so impressed by what they offer that I can’t help but being a little enthusiastic about it.

To get started with Microsoft Office Live Basics, you simply go to http://office.live.com/ and click “Sign up now” under the “Basics” service area. Microsoft does offer some higher levels of Web hosting for your business for a monthly fee, but if you’re reading this blog, you probably aren’t ready to invest in these service levels at this point.

Once you sign up, you will be guided through all of the necessary steps to register your domain name and start building your site. The entire process can be completed in a few minutes, but you may want to leave yourself plenty of time to explore.

Essentially, Microsoft Office Live Basics will provide you with a domain name (free…not just when you sign up, but for as long as you have your account), web hosting (so people can access your site), and up to 25 e-mail addresses. All you need to have is a high-speed internet connection and Internet Explorer version 6.0 or better (Mac and Linux users may need to download Internet Explorer).

When I signed up for this service to create my own Web site, I was mostly interested in the domain registration and the Web hosting. These are critical to creating an online presence. But as time goes on, I realize that the ability to create multiple e-mail accounts is also a great feature. You probably have at least one e-mail account by now, but you may want to take advantage of the opportunity to register multiple e-mail addresses on your new site for two reasons:

• To protect your personal e-mail account from spam and general clutter. You probably use your primary e-mail account to communicate with your friends and family. If you are serious about creating a Web presence, however, your e-mail address will often be associated with many of the online services you use. In addition to the regular updates and notifications these services will send you, your e-mail address may be made publicly available on the service Web sites, which increases your “spam potential.” You will probably want to make it easy for people to contact you initially, at least until you’ve built up a sizeable Web presence. However, you may not want all of this traffic getting mixed up with your personal e-mails to friends and family members.

• To protect your “true” identity: Your primary e-mail address is probably either a modification of your name, or a cute description of your personality (kittylover@aol.com, for example). While it is entirely up to you to use your regular e-mail address or not, you might want to consider creating a new e-mail address that can be used anywhere you “make your mark,” such as comments you leave on blog posts, account profiles for the services you use, and so forth.

  IMPORTANT NOTE: When you register a domain name, all of your contact information becomes part of the public record, and can be accessed by anyone. This includes your e-mail address that you used to sign up for Office Live Basics, as well as your real name and your mailing address. Keep this in mind when you start building your Web site.

What you can do with Microsoft Office Live Basics?

You don’t need to know anything about HTML to use Microsoft Office Live Basics. Once you’re signed up, you can start building your site right away. You have a variety of tools to enable you to create and customize your Web site. You can upload and include graphics on your site, as well as text, tables, and some HTML (if you’re so inclined).

You can also change the look and feel of your Web site by choosing from a variety of pre-set color schemes and basic images, as well as choosing between a few very basic options for the navigation structure of your site.

Your free site comes with 500MB of storage, 10GB of bandwidth, and up to 25 custom e-mail addresses that can be accessed via the new Windows Live Hotmail. This is more than enough to get you started, but if you outgrow any of these features, you can purchase upgrades for a small monthly fee.

What you can’t do with Microsoft Office Live Basics

Although I’m a huge fan of Microsoft Office Live, I freely admit that this is not ever going to be a perfect solution for every Web site. The free service certainly has some limitations. Over the next few months, I will help you find creative ways to work around these limitations where possible.

Your options for color schemes on your site are fairly limited. Although there are enough options for you to create a decent-looking site, you will not be able to specify your own color scheme, nor will you be able to create your own style sheet (at least for the primary pages on your site).

At the top of every Web site created through Microsoft Office Live, you will have a header banner containing your site’s name or logo. You are given several options for the appearance of this portion of your page, but your choices are limited to the pre-defined styles Microsoft offers. Again, there are enough choices to make a decent-looking site, but your customization options are limited.

Although you will not see excessive advertisements on your site, you will have to put up with a Windows Live search bar at the top of your page (It’s pretty unobtrusive, but it’s always going to be there), as well as a Microsoft Office Live logo at the bottom of every page (with a link to the Microsoft Office Live services page). I don’t find either of these items to be distracting or disturbing, but it’s important to know that you can’t turn them off.

You may not be able to embed certain external content (including revenue-generating advertisements you select, such as Google’s AdSense program), so don’t plan on making a lot of money by advertising on your site. This is one area we will explore in much greater detail over the next few months…there are ways to work around this inconvenience so you can embed external content or advertisements on some pages in your site, if you’re willing to get a little creative. I don’t know if this restriction is an intentional effort from Microsoft, or if it’s just a glitch. It appears that the tracking scripts that are used to track your site visitors (which are embedded on any page you create in the design center, like it or not) interfere with the page’s ability to load external content. Every time I’ve tried to run external scripts on my site, they have bogged down the server completely, and the page would not load.

Note that you can embed external content via an iframe, but not via a script. If you want to embed music or video files, I believe you can do so through the standard embed tag.

In general, you can not have interactive content on your Web site. The closest Microsoft comes is to offer you a “contact us” form that visitors can use to send you an e-mail (if you don’t want to reveal your e-mail address). This is a nice feature, to be sure. But in today’s Web 2.0 world, people do expect to be able to interact with your Web site. This is another area we will explore in more detail over the next few months.

The last thing to point out is that there is no security available with Microsoft Office Live Basics. Whatever you put on your Web site is going to be freely accessible to anyone in the world. Keep this in mind, especially if you’re creating a family Web site. Anything you put on your site can be viewed by anyone and used for any purposes. Of course, if you’re starting a small business, this is exactly what you want.

For those of you who are a little more tech-savvy (or is geeky more appropriate?), it might be worth pointing out that your domain name is registered by Microsoft on your behalf. This means that you will not be able to manage your domain. Some services (like blogger.com and wordpress.com) claim that you can make your blog a part of your own domain by modifying the CNAME registry for that domain. This is an excellent service, but unfortunately, you can’t make any changes to your domain registration when you use Microsoft Office Live Basics.

Is it worth it?

Don’t let these inconveniences fool you. Just having your own Web page with your own custom domain name is enough to make the service worthwile. Whether you’re creating a family Web page, a “home base” for your Web presence, or a small online business, establishing your own Web site is a key factor for success. And, with a little bit of ingenuity, you’ll be able to create a dynamic, interactive Web site to fit your personal or business needs, and no one but you will ever know that you have any limitations to your Web site.

That’s all for today. In my next post, I’ll talk about starting your own blog to support your online presence. If you’re just building your reputation, a blog is an excellent way for you to get noticed. Although you can’t host your blog effectively on your Microsoft Office Live Basics Web site, it’s probably worth starting a blog elsewhere. A blog will help you build a reputation for yourself, and it will also make your visitors feel connected to your site.

Once I’ve outlined the process for setting up your Web site and starting your blog, I’ll get into the really fun stuff: how to make your Web site interactive. We’ll discuss ways to embed external content into your site, build applications to collect and/or display information from your visitors, and even build your own e-commerce solution. And we’ll do it all without spending a penny!

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Brought to you by Lockworld Herald.

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