So you decided you wanted to build a website and now you are faced with all this information and you do not know where to start. Everybody online is promising the moon and stars and it's almost impossible to tell which ones are genuine and which ones are not.

A lot of these sales pitches make it sound like you can build a site go to sleep wake up in the morning to thousands in your bank account. So its time to step back from it all and take stock of your position as this will help clear your mind. What are you prepared to do? What are your strengths and weaknesses?

Often times we run off and buy stuff and never think out how we can practically apply it. Remember information is one thing it is the application of information which becomes knowledge and this will provide you with a real experience. A real experience will provide real results. The speed of implementation will bring about these results sooner rather than later.

Where to start? Note down your interests and then visit article directories and forums and see how popular your subjects of interest are. From here you will get keywords and then you want see how often those keywords get searched. Keywords are your sites building blocks. If the building blocks are weak the overall structure will be weak.

Take your time in the research phase as this lays the foundation. Don't be afraid to deviate from your central idea especially if you find that a particular topic under the main subject seems to generate more searches and interest.

In other words be flexible. When it comes to building a site you can use a site builder. Just make sure they can build webpage's that are structurally sound in terms of code and keyword density. Take care of the basics, keep it simple and your odds of success will be vastly increased.

There are two approaches to DIY Website Construction.

The first is to go about gathering and purchasing all of the components separately. The second is to buy a package that has all of the components and build your website yourself using the tools at your disposal.

When you think about what you will need for a DIY Website Construction, consider the following:

• Domain Name
• Web Hosting
• Templates or HTML program
• Keyword Research
• Content generation
• Autoresponder
• Sitemap submission
• Community or forum for support

If you don't do this on a regular basis, putting all of the pieces together for a DIY website may seem overwhelming.

But you don't need to put all of the separate components together to do your website yourself. You can buy a package that combines the best of everything.

One thing, though. Your best bet is NOT one of the domain name services. These services allow you to get a "brochure site" up quickly. But they don't help you generate a website that sells. And, unless you are putting up a website just for friends and family, there's no use in a website that doesn't sell.

Instead, you should look for a package company whose goal is to make your site sell. They're not there to sell lots of additional components, they want you to succeed.

For one price, you should get your domain name, web hosting, templates, keyword research, an autoresponder, email addresses, sitemap submission, statistics monitoring, and more. You also want to make sure that there is some level of support for the community whether it is phone based technical support or a welcoming forum.

If you're not ready to put all of the components of a DIY website together yourself yet, I recommend Site Build It for a package deal. It includes all of the necessary components and has a very supportive forum community.

To get the SBI package deal, click through to my Small Business Website Marketing Blog.

Functions are used to perform a well defined task that is normally repeated at various places within a web site, web application, or other software application. The function sometimes needs certain information before performing its task, and sometimes returns a value to the calling page or program.

An example of how to use a simple function in PHP:

 function showMessage() {
echo "{$_SESSION["message"]}"; }

The above example shows a very simple function that displays the contents of a session variable called 'message'. The idea being that while a user is using a web site, etc, various messages are generated and stored in the 'message' session variable. Whenever the showMessage function is called, the contents of the session variable are displayed. So, for example, when the user logs on, you could display a message saying that they have done so. Likewise, when they log off, a different message could be displayed.

Calling a function

To call the showMessage function, you would just need to include the line:

showMessage()

in the web page (wrapped in php tags to distinguish it from normall HTML).

Passing values to a function

Often, a function requires one or more input values in order to perform its task. For example, take the following example that takes two numbers as input, and adds them together. The result is then returned to the calling web page or program.

function addNumbers($number1,$number2) {
$answer = $number1 + $number2;
return $answer; }

In the calling program we would have something similar to the following:

$number1 = "5";
$number2 = "6";
$sumOfNumbers = addNumbers($number1,$number2);
echo "$sumOfNumbers";

Obviously, in a real program you would not have the numbers hardcoded like this, but they would be obtained from user input or by some other means. Notice also that although the name of the returned variable is $answer, the calling program makes no reference to that. We could, if we wanted to, change the calling program to:

$answer = addNumbers($number1,$number2);
echo "$answer";

which might make things slightly easier to understand.