Commercial websites, like TV commercials, are not suited to the trial and error approach that many people take to them. A successful site has to hit it's target, or gets dumped and forgotten very quickly. This is the reason why a small business needs the very best presentation, design and planning in place before they get the wallet out, or publicize for their site.

It is really amazing how many enterprises can benefit from the same Internet convenience that financial institutions have demonstrated, is a big money saver. Just think of how much more business and time to cultivate more you can gain by developing innovative new ways of selling your product or service to web customers. How many sales calls, courier trips or time consuming office visits could you eliminate for your customers?

People are increasingly shopping for business partners that can network with them over this new medium, to accomplish all of these goals, and you don't necessarily have to go the whole-hog big-site, or complex integration route to generate tidy profits, by expanding your sales into the virtual world. A small website can generate constant income, without costly credit card merchant accounts or undue staffing, and give you an automated source of revenue, if planned properly.

There is now a rush to this new market, and those who lag behind, may find themselves out of the competitive picture. If you have a product or service, even if it's a local business, you can expand your sales contacts and improve your customer service with a properly designed site. Every business needs a slightly different interface to meet this challenge and that's what we are about.

Getting Started

If you don't understand how this html stuff works, don't worry, it's childishly simple! The only difference between a "note" you write and save for yourself as text in Notepad, or Wordpad and a "html document" is the letters at the end of the filename! HTML is just text! The file mynote.txt is exactly the same sort of file as mynote.htm is, it is just the way the text is written that is a little different.

To get started, you have to have a way of telling your computer you want to use "this program" or "that program" to deal with the file, instead of the one Windows makes it "belong to" by default! This is how you do so, in Windows:

1. Open Windows Explorer. and go to C:\Windows, then to \Start Menu, then to \Programs, then to \Accessories and find your "Notepad" shortcut.

2. Make another copy of your shortcut to Notepad. You should just click it once to "select" it, within the folder you are now looking into.

3. Right-click and select "Copy" from the "Context menu" that pops up, to copy this shortcut into your computers memory "Clipboard".

4. Now, in Explorer, on the left hand side, go to the: C:\Windows\Send To folder. "\Send To" is a magical folder!

5. Right click and choose to "Paste" this copy of "Shortcut to Notepad" into this \Send To folder. It is still on your clipboard, since you just copied it earlier!

6. Make sure it's name is just "Notepad". Delete the unnecessary "Shortcut to" stuff off of it's name, if it appears, by Right click - renaming it.

Now all you have to do is save yourself some copies af web pages and experiment with changing them to see how the changes work. Just remember that by naming the file myfile.htm (or html) it will open, and be rendered in your web browser. To edit myfile.htm, just send it to Notepad or Wordpad, change it and save the changes. When you click on it, it will open on your browser. You can also change a document that is already showing in your browser then just press reload to see the changes. Now you will need to go to a HTML beginners guide and find out what sort of tags you need to surround your text with in order to compose your own web pages!