Looking to launch a dynamic website that you could edit on your own, without any technical knowledge and all on a shoestring budget?

Do-It-Yourself Web Design packages allow you to pick a website design from a library of dozens of professionally created designs categorized by industry, customize the site to your liking, upload your own logo & content and take the site live, without having to rely on a web designer.

The service fee ranges between $20 to $30 a month and includes hosting, content-management-system that lets you continually edit & manage the site, a domain name and free stock photos to incorporate into your website.

An ideal solution for someone on a shoestring budget, these cheap web design packages are a great way to take your first step in the Internet Marketing world and secure an online presence for your business without breaking the bank.

Things to consider:
* While fully functional, a Do-It-Yourself website normally doesn't look as "impressive" as a website that was put together by a professional team of designers, copywriters and web developers (see samples below)
* You will have to invest at least 5 hours initially to customize the site to your liking using the built-in user friendly content management system. After that you should plan on investing about 1 hour every week to continually update the site.
* It's easy to upgrade from the Do-It-Yourself package to a higher level website at any point in time.

More information:
To see samples & test drive the system please click here

Here are some of the sample styles available for you to choose from:



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One of the cheapest ways to launch a professional-looking website in short time, is to use Website Templates.

Website templates are ready-made complete websites, created by a team of graphic designers and web developers, usually sold at 1/5 the market price.

As an example, a professional website for a hair-dresser complete with Flash, background music, 8 pages and Photoshop-quality images, would cost about $2,500 with a typical web design firm. The same website is only going to cost about $500 if sold as a template.

The catch? When you buy a template you're buying a ready-made website. This means that although the website would look professionally made, your content (logo, text, product images etc) is not going to be there.

You'd have to pay a web designer to tweak the template, inserting your logo and personalize it with your template.

Nevertheless, the cost of paying a web designer for a few hours of tweaking a template you like, greatly reduces the complexity, costs & time involved in launching a website.

You can pick a website template from a collection of 10,000+ professional-grade template. Once you pick the look & feel you like, it normally wouldn't take more than 3 to 5 hours for a web designer to customize the template to fit your needs.

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Here at SoftwareProjects we always recommend clients look into Website Templates before they commit to spending big bucks on creating a complete website from scratch.

Sample website templates:


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Definition:
A site is made for AdSense if its sole purpose is to get users to click on AdSense ads.
A site is NOT made for AdSense if its primary purpose is to provide unique content and you decide display ads as means of generating revenues, utilizing Google AdSense, YPN and other contextual advertising networks.

Why are everyone buying MFA sites?
The thing with MFA sites is that they work. Most people don't understand Google AdSense and don't realize clicking on a site filled with nothing but ads generates money to the site owner as well as Google, costing money to an innocent advertiser.

Revenues from MFA sites typically average well below $100 per day, however smart marketers put together a thousand of MFA sites, accumulating a sizable revenue all sites combined.

The Problem:
MFA sites are a violation of Google's terms of service. Google is working hard on bringing down all MFA sites, as part of their fight against click-fraud. If identified as an MFA site, your Google AdSense account will be shutdown and any revenues accumulated to date will be lost.

Alternative Solution:
Instead of creating an MFA site which is 100% ads with no real content, create a network of small sites, each revolving around a particular niche, each with a few quality original articles in that particular niche and utilize Google AdSense to integrate ads as part of your articles. This way you are not violating Google's terms of service, you are providing quality original content to your website visitors and if done right, such a network of sites can generate a sustaining revenue from contextual advertising over a long period of time.

See screenshot showing a sample GOOD way of integrating Google AdSense into a bare-bones 5 articles content website. Users are bound to click on the ads as they appear to be relevant and flow well with the rest of the site:



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New York, NY October 7, 2006 -- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- SoftwareProjects.com (http://www.softwareprojects.com), trusted leader in Internet Marketing and Web Development since 1998, is giving away $100,000 worth of Web Development services, to celebrate the launch of its new online Software Projects marketplace.

The creation of SoftwareProjects marketplace builds on the success 2,000+ businesses have experienced by utilizing SoftwareProjects.com Web Development services. Unlike other online marketplaces, SoftwareProjects offers Deadline Guarantees, no Bidding Process and an All-In-House staff of 200 US-based web designers, software engineers, graphic designers and Internet experts.

"In every industry, you have the Ritz Carlton's and the Motel 6's. At SoftwareProjects, we pride ourselves at often being compared to a Ritz Carlton. We're not the cheapest game in town, but you're not going to find too many web development companies with Fortune 1000 clients -- who will pay you back for every day behind schedule, provide a dedicated project manager with 4-hours SLA and back all work with an unconditional 100% satisfaction guarantee; That's SoftwareProjects stance" explains David Finley, Chief Technology Officer.

After completing thousands of successful projects, SoftwareProjects is announcing today the release of a new robust marketplace project management system. A web-based platform enabling clients to approve specs, monitor progress in realtime, communicate with engineers and review project completion notes.

"We're very proud of our new platform and are looking forward to use this system to continually meet and exceed customer expectation." says Richard Anderson, CEO.

To celebrate the release of its new platform, SoftwareProjects is giving away $100,000 -- offering 2 hours of FREE web development services for the first 400 new clients who signup for the service. To take advantage of this offer, visit http://www.softwareprojects.com/promo.php

About SoftwareProjects Inc.
Headquartered in New York, with Sales and R&D offices around the globe, SoftwareProjects is a full service one-stop-shop for Internet Marketing & Web Development. The company's focus is helping businesses sell more online, providing a wide spectrum of services including: Email Marketing, PPC Management, Landing pages, Affiliate systems and Web development. SoftwareProjects currently supports more than 2,000 businesses in 14 countries.

For more information, please visit http://www.softwareprojects.com/projects

For those of you not familiar with Google Sitemap, it's a new tool released by Google early 2006. Google Sitemap allows website owners to submit a list of all site pages, helping Google make sure every single page is indexed.

Why should you care every single page of your site is indexed?

Imagine for example a website selling T-Shirts has 20 pages. The front page of the site includes images and links to the various T-Shirts sold on the site. A certain page burried under 3 links, promotes a unique Hawaiian T-Shirt that is on sale for the month.

Depending on your site popularity (number of inbound links), Google may or may not index all 20 pages of your site. We often see cases, particularly with new sites, where Google only indexes a portion of the website.

This means that it is possible Google may decide to index 18 pages of our T-Shirt website, leaving our Hawaiian T-Shirt page outside of Google's search index.

Users searching for these products on www.google.com will not be presented with your site as a target destination. You lose money.

Google Sitemap to the Rescue

Google Sitemap (https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps) solves this problem by letting webmasters submit all pages to ensure the Googlebot indexes every single page of your site.

Google will still be crawling your site regularly, however submitting a sitemap helps to make sure no burried pages are missed.

Is it worth submitting a sitemap?

Search engine forums are filled with discussions about Google Sitemap, with some users reporting absolutely no difference (in number of pages indexed) after submitting sitemaps, while other users are claiming the opposite.

To make sense of it all, so that we can provide better service to clients, I've decided to run a small experiment, putting Google Sitemap to the test.

I picked four client websites, in similar niches, all brand new sites with zero SEO visibility. We completed our on-site SEO optimization for al four sites. Two of the four websites were submitted to Google Sitemap.

60 Days later - Analysis of GoogleSitemap results

60 days after running our experiment, leaving all four sites untouched with absolutely no off-site SEO optimization, the results came in - All sites scored a similar PageRank (1/10) and similar Alexa traffic ratings, the two sites submitted to Google Sitemap had every single page indexed by www.google.com, while the two other sites got only 2 out of 30 pages indexed on Google.

The conclusion?

While submitting a sitemap to Google is not going to improve your search engine ranking, it's definitely going to ensure every single page of your site is indexed. And having every single page of your site indexed by Google means more customers are going to find your products and services online.

Google is the first search engine to launch this initiative, however - Google's sitemap is an "open standard" and more search engines are expected to adopt a similar system.

To get started - point your browser to https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps , claim your site as the owner and start submitting your sitemap to Google regularly.

If you need help setting this up, contact a qualified Internet Marketing company for assistance.

Outsourcing software development to India, Pakistan and Ukraine has become more and more popular over the last few years, with more US businesses looking offshore to save costs on software and website development.

A client recently asked me "If I can pay 5 times less in India and get the website done within the same time, why should I bother dealing with US companies?"

Puzzeled for a minute, I promised to think about it and come up with the pros and cons of "shoring" vs. working with a local company.

Here are the top two I came up with -

Benefits of offshore website development:

* Cost - often five times less

* Time to market - Time zone differences combined with the longer hours invested by offshore companies, means you usually get the finished product sooner

Objections to Outsourcing offshore:

* Cultural differences and communication challenges, often lead to hidden costs, frustration and an uncertain completion date.

* Lack of privacy & security. Source code developed for your company is likely to be embedded into other projects. (Read about government data leak)

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If you feel the pros of offshoring outweigh the cons, make sure you use a "middle-man" in the form of an online market place. It's a great way to mitigate the risk.

These online market places help ensuring you are buying from a legitimate provider, by listing past performance, feedback and earning's history as well as serving as an escrow holding payment until you are fully satisfied with the work.

I've put together a list of the top online market places to buy software development, webdesign and graphic design online -

Project Spring
IT Moonlighter
Hire Bidder
Freelance Web Projects
Image Lance
Web Developers Index
ScriptLance
Got Projects
Outsource Today
Freelance Auctions
Programming Bids
12 Freelance
Freelance Spot
Select Designer
City IT Jobs
Freelance Web Programming
Freelance Direct
Freelance Central
Elance
Max Lance
The Centrall Mall
Contracted Work
Quovix
Japher Base
Free Agent
Projects Pool
CodeLance

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