If your web site is taking forever to load, half of your visitors will leave the page without even having a glimpse of what you have to offer. No matter how hard we work on our content, it will just be a waste of energy as most visitors will not stick around till it get loaded.

I, myself am guilty of not having fast loading web pages and I started working on it recently. I decided to share something very useful I found during this process. It is Yahoo’s Yslow firefox Add-on.

YSlow analyzes web pages and recommends ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages.

Yahoo’s performance team has identified 34 rules that determines the performance of a web page. Yslow analyzes 22 of these 34 rules which are testable. They have discovered that a web page’s performance can be increased by up to 50% following these rules.

Yslow give points on how your web site is measured on each rule and gives an overall grade for the complete web page.

You can start optimizing your web pages according to the grades given. If you are not sure of how to follow a certain rule you can always search for the term and find valuable resources. I got an “F” grade ( worst) when I installed this yesterday and managed to move up a grade during the past 24 years.

Yslow comes with some other usable tools which will help you analyze your pages easily. For an example, All JS Minified tool collects all external and inline JavaScript and removes comments and white space to decrease the size of the scripts. You can replace your JavaScript with the minified version to improve performance of the web page.

If you click on All Smush.it tool, Smush.it will be run on all the image components on the page. This tool will tell you which images can be optimized and will create a zip file with the optimized images. Likewise there are number of tools and reports comes with this add-on which will make your life more easy as a web entrepreneur.

Download Yslow here. It comes with the best price tag. 100% FREE.

Create a blog like this and start earning money.

Tweet This Post

No matter how many times I have answered this question before and even after writing the ” How To Create a blog” series I still get this question from some of my readers, “How Do I Get My Own Website Onto The Web?”

Building your own web site might have been a nightmare few years ago but now it is as easy as 1-2-3-4….

Step 01: Register a domain name

Domain name is your identity on the web. For example this web site’s identity is “antharjalaya.com”. You need to use a domain registrar in order to purchase the domain name. It will typically cost you less than $10.

I would advise you to buy a “dot com” name instead of other extensions. Try adding a hyphen and seperate the words if your desired name is not available in dot com format.
i.e
If startforextrading.com is not available try registering start-forex-trading.com

If it is impossible to buy your domain name in the dot com format try dot org or dot net. If your target market is limited to a specific country buying a country specific domain is also advisable.

I have posted a complete step by step tutorial on how to buy a domain name in one of my earlier blog post. Read it here.

Step 02 : Create your web site.

Make sure you present your web site with a high level of quality, functionality, and professionalism. You can hire a web designer if you you do not have any previous experience. This is the most common approach adopted by many web entrepreneurs and this is the easiest way to get your web site up and running.

Hiring a web designer will cost you approximately $100- $1500 and higher price web designers are not always the best. So, have a very good look at their portfolio before making any upfront payment.

Designing your own web site can be a quite entertaining experience
if you are a quick learner.You need to learn little HTML but it is not difficult considering all the resources available online.

You can use a simple text editor to write your HTML pages, or you can utilize on of the many free HTML editors available on the web.

I use Adobe Dreamweaver software as it does all the HTML coding for me. But you are still required to learn the basics of HTML. If you know how to use MS word, it will not be difficult to use Dreamweaver.

Website templates.

One easy way to get your website design is to begin with a template. Website templates are Semi finished web pages that have been predesigned and assembled with all the graphics and necessary code needed to get a web site online quickly.

The above is an example for a fashion/ clothing template. You can just edit the text and make it your own web design.

There are many places on the web where you can buy templates, or get them for free. An important aspect of using a template is to utilize as much customization as possible. For a startup company, a template is a good way to save some money and focus on keeping up a positive cash flow.

Step 03: Choose a web hosting plan

In order for your website to be available to anyone at anytime, you need to host it with a web host. It is a web server leased to you by a web hosting company. Basically, web hosting provides a way for people to access your web site through the internet. Without it, there would be no way for people to see the page.

There are several thousand web hosting companies out there to choose from. It’s best to chose a web hosting company based on a recommendation. You need to look for following details before making this very important decision.

1. Reliability and speed of access
2. Bandwidth allocated to you.
3. Disk space given to you.
4. Their Technical support.
5. Availability of FTP, PHP, Perl, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH, and MySQL.
6. Email, Autoresponders, POP3, Mail Forwarding.
7. Control Panel type.
8. Multiple Domain Hosting and Subdomains.
9. Price
10.Monthly/Quarterly/Annual Payment Plans.

I have posted a complete step by step tutorial on how to set up a hosting account in one of my earlier blog post. Read it here.

The following are the best web host companies I can recommend for you to use. I have done an in depth analysis of all these providers and they simply meet all the criterias of a good host.

Hostgator

This is what I use for all my web sites. I bought one unlimited plan and now I am hosting over dozen web sites with Hostgator without paying anything extra.

Special Features :
One click blog/ forum and other scripts installation.
Excellent support staff.
45 Day Money Back Guarantee.
Beautiful and professional web template gallery.
Starting at $4.95 a month.

Blue Host

They will give you a domain name for free and Unlimited domains can be hosted for no extra charge. Starting at $6.95 a month.

Fat Cow

They will provide a Free Domain name, Unlimited disk space, Unlimited bandwidth and Point & Click Site Building Tools.
Other than that they will fix you with $75 worth FREE advertising.
They do not have a monthly payment plan and their service will cost you $66 a year. ($ 10 off for our readers for a limited time and your cost will only be $56.)

PoWWEb

Free Domain name, Unlimited disk space, Unlimited bandwidth and Script Instant Installer starting at $4.88 a month.

Step 04 : Upload your site to the web.

There are 2 ways of uploading your web site files to Internet. The most common method is via FTP. FTP allows you to quickly transfer many files and I am using the FREE software “filezila” for this purpose.

Another method is to use the File Manager within your cPanel control panel, which has an upload feature which allows you to browse your computer and select the files you wish to upload.

Time will not stop and wait for you

If you have an idea for a web site , start acting on it today. Don’t wait till you learn everything. That will never happen. You cannot learn to swim by reading a guide book. This is the same.

I did not know anything about building web sites until I start building one. My first web site taught me everything I need to build and run a web site.

It will not cost you more than $15 to start. ( $10 for the domain name and $5 for the first month hosting.) Allocate one hour from your day and you will end up with a rewarding web site in 14 days.

Tweet This Post