Creating and designing a website from scratch is probably the single most common problem that deter a lot of people from setting up their own websites. Most people’s heads would start screaming the moment they see HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP scripting, etc. The fact is all these are not really that hard to learn if you really set your heart to it.

Please note that this is different from setting up a blog. If you are setting up a blog, there are many free blogging softwares around and you do not need to do much designing except for a bit customization and that’s where HTML and CSS knowledge comes in. At a higher level, you should most probably learn some basic Javascript and PHP coding.

If you are building a normal site rather than a blog, please read on.

Being a internet marketer, there’s is no way you can escape coming across all these stuff online . At the very basic level, you should try and learn HTML and CSS. These two will form the foundation in which your internet business is build on.

Unless you are willing to come out a sizable sum of money to engage a web designer to do it for you, the best option is to design your site yourself. Even then if you need to tweak and modify your site in the future (which is a very common thing), there’s no way you are going to pay the web designer another sum of money just to do some minor tweaking. You will gain a lot just by designing your first site. These experiences would come in handy in the future.

Designing and building your first site is a very simple and easy job. Some of the best softwares around are Dreamweaver and Frontpage. Learning them would probably take quite a bit of time but it’s worth it.

Unless you are setting up affiliate marketing sites that only have one or few pages, it would be advisable to go something simpler and more powerful and there are many free options around.

Open source CMS (content management systems) such as Joomla and Drupal are good for those of you who want to start a site with lots of content in the future.

Joomla is one of the best open-source CMS to use if you intend to set up a content heavy site. For me, I have been using Joomla on a number of sites and they run well without any issues at all.

There are a few factors that contribute to my vote for using Joomla:

1) It’s free and good.

2) Simple and easy to use. Average learning curve.

3)Joomla is a very powerful CMS capable of managing thousands of pages of content and more.

3) Tons of free and nice looking templates for your site. I

4) Lots of components, plugins and mods (tools) to enhance your site and make it more powerful and full of features. Most of these tools are free as they are create by the Joomla community for Joomla users.

5) Very stable platform and low security risk and the community are very helpful and always coming up with new tools to enhance Joomla.

So if you are thinking of setting up a content heavy site, why not give Joomla a try. You will not regret it.

For good resources on setting up a website, please check out my “Recommended Resources” section.