Anybody who wants to start a business looks for minimum investment & maximum returns, especially small businesses where capital is low.

The cheapest mode of marketing your business & letting people know about your products/services is internet. That's the reason why lots & lots of small business enterprises are now looking for internet marketing as a new potential area of business. Of course, to promote your business online, you need to have a powerful website.

A website is a virtual portal containing information about your company, products & services. You can either setup an online store & sell products thereon, or you can simply provide your contact information on your website, so that people can contact you for your services. In either case, it is very important that you design an attractive website so that users get drawn to it.

Attractive does not mean loads of graphics & colors. But it means a site that has balance of all. A good website has a decent layout, great information & is easily accessible. Too much graphics, flash & other such factors delay the downloading of the site, which can be frustrating to user. It also means it is difficult to promote it through search engines freely.

The best solution is to approach a professional company & make your goal clearer to them. For a little investment, you can get a great website ready to market. A properly designed website goes a long way to determine your online business. If you can increase your customer base online, you can then think of creating your brand offline as well. Once people start visiting your website & you offer them services/products online, you can built a base to your business wherein you can expand it offline as well.

Lot of companies provide complete package for small business website development, design & hosting. These services also extend to online promotion of your site like search engine optimization services. So, in short, you can hire a company that can manage your entire online business.

While choosing a company, you can either be specific about how you want your website designed, developed or hosted; or you can just provide them with your business idea. Of course, you should be prepared to offer your services/products once customers start pouring in.

So, if you are planning to start a small business then developing a website is the first step you should take.

Let's begin with a little history. Many years ago, when the web was up and coming and you needed to be on it, I paid someone to build a site for me. Afterwards, I could say, "Yeah, I have a site, go to -" and then I would name my site a feel a hit of pride. I'd also get satisfaction when my webmaster (if you could call him that; I don't know that I would in retrospect, but that's another story) occasionally forwarded me an email of an interested visitor. My satisfaction was short-lived, as you might imagine. I soon began to understand the power of the web and found the sad reality that my "webmaster" was getting all my emails from my website visitors to be annoying. I had him change this so that the emails came to me. He charged me a one-time fee for getting him to do this.

Okay, so these days it is not quite that bad, is it? Your webmaster or whoever is doing the "web thing" for you isn't charging you for every little service? Excuse me. I'll reserve my rant for another article, or possibly a blog entry.

So anyway, I fired my webmaster. I built my own webpage. I did this - of all things - with Microsoft Publisher. Yeah, well, it worked - in that I was able to build a site and, with some effort, get it on the web. I won't go into why you shouldn't try this, kids, at home. I was at home when I tried it, sure. But I don't suggest building a site with Publisher. It can be done, but don't do it.

One thing that happens - talk about annoying: The site crams all against the left side of the page. There's nothing you can do to change that. You might as well type out onto the web page "Look, Ma, I can create a website using Publisher." Don't do it.

Well, I knew at the time I shouldn't be messing around with Publisher. It's great for putting together a book or something for print. It's not good for websites. I had just been so excited because I had created a downloadable book for lulu.com. Publisher was great for laying out a book. I had so much momentum...

I put the Publisher site up, and thought I had done a pretty good job, considering that everything was crammed up to the left of the screen. I had yet to become a blogger, and I had yet to realize the importance of tagging and so on. All that important "extra" stuff. I'm joking. Writing tags is not extra. It's essential. So is the blog - on the website.

Then I bought FrontPage and a book and... That's all she wrote. I learned FrontPage and I haven't tried anything else out since. Why not? So far I don't need to use the fantastic Dreamweaver that everyone talks about. Oh, I can't do Flash on FrontPage? Uh - yes you can. Easily.

I continue to believe that content is all-important. Not bells. Not whistles. Content. I don't care what kind of a site you are putting up. Well, okay, I wouldn't necessarily use FrontPage for every circumstance. But for you and me, the individual or small company that wants to be up and shining on the web, FrontPage is the clear answer. At least it was for me. As I say, I haven't looked back since.

One needn't learn the bells and whistles. One certainly needn't incorporate dhtml or whatever that code is that will make letters pop and fly about. Old browsers can't see it, and new browsers - mine, at least - don't want to see it.

I have affiliated with companies. That is, I've tried to turn a dollar by putting them up on my site, a link or banner or what have you. Let me say that what I don't like are the banners that flicker and blink and all that junk. If I want the Las Vegas experience, I'll go there.

Just give me content. FrontPage can handle that and handle it well. You want to be able to upload Flash, for sure. FrontPage can do it. You want to be able to get as much information on your website with as few bytes as possible. FrontPage can do this as well as any program. So, I'm happy. Are you happy - yet?

So you are passionate about a particular subject and you want to take your passion online. At this point you may not know where to start and this is where I hope I can help you. After all you deserve to share your passion with others and they will benefit from it also.

The key to building any website is to build it with your visitor in mind. What can you truly do for them that will add value to their experience when visiting your site? Let's take for example that you enjoy building model planes. The first place you are going to visit is the online forums.

The reason I choose forums is because this is where conversations take place relative to any given topic. This will give you a measure of interest. The first step is to see how up to date the forum is and secondly how many posts it receives per day. Additionally how many people respond to those posts on any given day?

Obviously the more the better, the more interest the better for you. The next thing you are going to look for is, what are the questions being asked and can you engage in the conversation and offer solutions. If this is the case your next task is to look for keywords. What keywords do people use to seek out solutions for their needs?

The next thing to do is look for a keyword tool. I am going to use Google's keyword tool for this example. Keyword tools by the way are not by any standard of the imagination an exact science. They give you a rough guide as to how many times a given keyword is searched. So do not think that the numbers you get are exact.

Your task right now is to develop a list of keywords.

Once you have this list you are now going to look at the level of competition. Starting out we do not want too much competition but remember competition is good as it means there is money to be made in that market.

We at this point are just looking for cheaper ways to enter the market. To do this enter your keyword into the search box in quotes. Then check how many websites are coming up for that keyword. If it is in the millions that is not good if it is in the thousands then that is great.

You will now be refining your list based on competition. Once the list is completely refined you will now have the general structure of your site. These keywords will make up individual web pages.

To conclude this is how to lay the foundation then once you have these keywords you will be ready to structure each of the pages on your site using each individual keyword with content relative to that. To learn how to put all this together select any of the links provided.