You're probably reading this either because you have a small business, a hobby, a cause you care about deeply, a special interest, or a charitable organization that you want the whole world to know about. And what better way to publicize it than by building a website for it?
But let's face it: building and maintaining a good website is expensive. Professional web designers cost you a fortune. So, what's the way out?
One option is to build a website yourself. To build a website, you must know HTML—the language of web pages. And mind you, that's just the beginning. If you want a slick, modern website, you'll need at least a passing acquaintance with CSS, JavaScript, XML, SQL, and other such technologies.
Can you learn these technologies? Sure, you can. Visit your local Barnes and Noble, and you'll find several shelves filled with books that teach these technologies to everyone imaginable—novices, professionals, experts, smart people, geeks, nerds, dummies, idiots, teenagers, women, seniors, busy people, lazy people, you name it. You have an option of learning these technologies within time frames ranging from a mere five minutes to as long as a month. Once you select your gender, age, IQ, and the time that you want to spend on your endeavour, you can find the exact book for your requirements.
However, the question is: Do you really want to immerse yourself in these technologies? If you'd rather concentrate on doing more of whatever it is that you do for a living, than keeping abreast of differences in document object models of Firefox and Internet Explorer (whatever that means), this book is for you. It shows you how to build your own website without learning HTML or any other technology with those three and four-letter acronyms.
If you're wondering how you'd build a website without HTML, relax. This book is not about witchcraft. Your website will, of course, be built with HTML. But you won't be the one writing the HTML. Office Live Small Business will do it for you.
Office Live Small Business is Microsoft's web-presence service for small businesses. It's part software and part service. In fact, Microsoft calls this strategy Software + Services.
The software component consists of several useful online business programs and tools. Among them is a set of templating tools for building and managing websites. The tools ask you to fill in some information about your business, choose a few options for deciding the look and feel of your website, and ask you to write the text of the pitch that you wish to make to your visitors. Based on the information you provide, the tools generate a website for you.
The services component provides domain name management, web hosting, storage, and other infrastructural facilities required to maintain a website. Office Live Small Business bundles all these services in a single convenient package. Together, the two components help you build a website quickly and easily.
Sounds improbable? Let me give you an example that you'll easily relate to. There's a good chance that you use accounting software, such as QuickBooks, to balance your books. Did you have to take a crash course in accounting before you began using it? No. All you probably did was fill out a questionnaire about your business, set up a list of people who pay you money, and a list of people you pay money to, entered your bank account numbers, and then began recording daily transactions. That's it! Now your accounting software figures out the debits and credits. It decides whether an entry goes to your balance sheet or your income statement, and also generates balancing entries when you cancel a transaction. In fact, it performs all the accounting summersaults that are necessary to produce the pretty reports that help you prove your honesty to the IRS at the end of the year.
If you think about it, the goal of the entire exercise was to produce those pretty reports. You had the option of hiring an accountant, learning accounting yourself, or buying accounting software to achieve that goal. You chose the latter, in all likelihood, because it didn't cost as much as an accountant and didn't take up as much time as learning to balance the books yourself. That left you more time to do what you do best: run your business.
What QuickBooks does for your accounting, Office Live Small Business does for your website. Using its site-building tools, you can build an attractive website for yourself without learning any new technology. You can have your proverbial cake and eat it too. Moreover, the icing on the cake is that your site won't cost you a red cent; all you pay for is your domain name.