I think a lot of people are waking up and realizing the internet isn’t a joke. At least it’s not anymore. Create a useful tool or web product and people will be handing over their credit cards faster than you can say e-commerce. You can make a living on the internet, spread a message, find your future spouse, raise 4.2 million dollars worth of presidential campaign money in 24 hours, and stay updated with current events to the second.

First, you will need a text editor such as TextMate for Mac, Notepad or PHP Web Designer 2007 for PC. There are also two things you must learn after you read up on how to design a website. Those are: Learn XHTML. Learn CSS. These two components are essential to building a solid website. If you build a large business website without knowing XHTML and CSS, you will be banging your head on the desk from troubles with cross-browser compatibility, search engine optimization, maintainability and more later down the road. If you need help learning XHTML and CSS, you can visit W3Schools or search for...

Ok, so you know about Facebook, Twitter, Google Trends, Web2.0, AJAX, YouTube and blogging (if you don’t you should read my first article, Step 1 to Building your Own Online Business). Next, you need to take your fresh list of ideas and start researching! Sound fun? The guys over at Thirty Day Challenge have come up with some great ways to research niche markets using FREE online tools. These tools are: Google Search Google Trends Free Keywords @ WordTracker.com They are simple yet they can determine almost EXACTLY how much traffic you can expect with a particular product and keyword phrase...

I am going to provide a few steps on starting a business, this being the first article. Since these processes are fresh in my memory, I am documenting what I have accomplished to try and make it easier for you to start your own web company. Of course, if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to let me know. I will only provide a bit of information at a time so you can research the material in small chunks. Finding your Niche Market. Write down a list of business ideas related to popular items you see when you walk around the mall or retail stores, what ads you see in magazines and what...

Call this a Guide to iMarketing in 2007. There are a lot of new technologies out there such as blogging, podcasting, social bookmarking and networking, search engine optimization, internet marketing and web2.0. I have been researching these technologies about 40 hours a week this summer to understand how everything fits together. Now, I want to share what I compiled. It’s a basic laundry list and doesn’t go very in depth, but there are a lot of excellent resources in this guide. If anyone has anything to add, please comment! I. Website ad planning, placement, and analytics: A. Conducting...

Yesterday, I came across a really cool site. He talk about topics I am interested in, such as SEO, web 2.0, blogging, marketing, and business in general. The other articles not pertaining to web design seem a little too opinionated and might scare some people off, but some of the web design articles are right on. Finding ‘Slayerment’ on the Digg home page a few days ago, I browsed the site and found some really great articles about web design to which I can relate. His posts about web design are very easy to read and entertaining most of the time. Check out his article that was featured...

I have written a few articles on CodeIgniter now because it truly has changed the way I develop websites. It has cut the development time in at least half, preventing redundant work by providing great built-in features that I can use in every one of my projects. Plus, CodeIgniter is so easy to pick up. You can start building CI apps in about 10 minutes after watching the CI tutorials and reading my tutorial on getting set up. If you are new to Object Oriented Programming, you can read my introduction to OOP also. The way CodeIgniter keeps you organized is this: It keeps everything separate and...

CodeIgniter is great because you can separate your content from your styling with controllers, models, and views. Another great thing is when you create a website with CI, you automatically use friendly URLs (if you use an .htaccess file). If you have a bunch of unrelated pages however, you might wonder how you can keep those URLs as tiny as possible without having thirty different controllers for each page. For example, I have a CI application with a home controller that has about 20 different functions inside of it. To access each one of these functions, I would normally visit http://localhost/home/contact...

This looks like it will be good. The challenge starts on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007. So far, I have learned about some great new tools for your website, some I haven’t even heard of before. If you haven’t already, sign up now! Catch up on the blogs, podcasts, video podcasts, and do a little research on the websites he mentions in the videos such as Facebook, Technorati, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, delicious, and Flickr. I don’t know how to use every one of them to their full advantage, but I think everyone’s in for a treat on Wednesday! Thirty Day Challenge Sign Up

CodeIgniter is an awesome tool if you want to learn PHP or start to use object oriented programming (OOP) with your new website. CodeIgniter is flexible with a small footprint and offers tons of features already built in, such as session management, active record use with mysql databases. The best part is it lets you use Model-View-Controller (MVC) programming. This way, your styling (view) is separate from your content (generated by controller) and lets you manipulate your raw data with a model. There are two awesome video tutorials on CodeIgniter to show you how powerful and easy CodeIgniter...