Creating Your Own Custom Website, Step 2

In my first article in this series, I talked about the importance of creating a custom website that will establish you as a credible Network Marketer. Providing quality content is crucial, but your website also has to be easy to navigate…you want people to view your content, poke around a little bit (navigate), and at least bookmark your site if they aren't inspired to take advantage of what you have to offer immediately.

I hope that you have taken my advice and downloaded SeaMonkey, and also downloaded some free templates that you can use to get started. Now for a little research!

Go check out several of the highest ranked websites (you are using the free Google toolbar - right?) Take a look at the navigation bar, usually on the left side of the page (recommended) or on the top to get an idea how the experts are constructing their nav bars. You probably aren't going to have near the content or number of pages these guys have, but you're just here for ideas on how to build a tool that makes it easy for your visitors to roam around your "cyberhome".

Now, copy and paste some of the high-quality content you've created into several pages using SeaMonkey. When you get to the point where you need to name these individual pages, make sure that they are called something that relates to the content, and contain a word that you intend to use in your nav bar. This isn't so much a technical requirement as it is just good methodology.

When you have several pages created, start to build your custom nav bar. Go into the edit mode for the page you're going to use as your "home" page, and replace the top link in your nav bar with the title you want to use for your home page. It will typically already say "Home" as a default, and that will work in most cases. If you want to rename it, just type over the existing text and you're done. Well, almost…it's kind of a personal thing, but I prefer not to enable the link associated with the text for the page actually being viewed. That's up to you, but it serves no purpose to create a link on a page that simply leads to the same page. OK, so I'm a little compulsive…

To disable a link that already exists, put your pointer somewhere in the text and left-click so that the cursor appears in the text. Then go to the SeaMonkey toolbar and click on Link. This will open a dialog box. If you are disabling an existing link, just delete what is there.

*Note - if you've elected to use a nav bar that goes across the top of the page, the first link will be the upper left vs. the top, and will proceed to the right as we go along.

Now you want to build a link on your home page to your second page. Select and rename the second link in your nav bar, highlight the text with your mouse, then click the Link button in the toolbar to open the dialog box. Click on "Choose File", then find the html file in your main website folder that you want to use as your second page. Double-click the file (it will appear in the dialog box), click OK, and you're done!

Simply repeat this process until you've created all the links on your home page to the other pages you've created, then go to each of those pages and build a nav bar that looks the same! You're getting very close to having a custom website!

One word of advice…test! You can open your home page just by double-clicking on the html file in your website folder. The file will open in a new browser window just as if it's live, even though it's only on your desktop. Check the navigation functions on all your pages, making sure that they go where you think they should go. Nothing will discourage a visitor more then ending up on the "Blenders" page when they clicked on "Refrigerators".

The next lesson will focus on linking to other websites…why you would want to, and how to do it without navigating away from your own website. You want to keep them on your website as long as possible, and bring them back often!