In today's economy many people are being forced out of the corporate world and starting small home business. The problem is that starting you own small business is expensive so we have decided to help these small businesses. This post deals mainly with a very small business website.

Prerequisites:

1. You must find your niche market.
2. You must make a mission statement and business plan. These do not have to elaborate but do have to be accurate as to your goals, expenses, etc.

First lets start out with what type of site will you need. There are two basic types of sites, informational and e commerce.

1. Informational - Provides information about your company and services.
2. e Commerce - Electronically sell your products online.

Second you need to determine the software for your site. We will list some software that is free and does not require you to purchase any additional software. There are thousands of software packages out there but these are the best of open source that are free. Also, since most people starting their own small business do not have any website experience, hosting companies like GoDaddy,  have pre-installed versions of many of these software packages.

1. Information
   1. Joomla
   2. Drupal
2. eCommerce
   1. osCommerce - there a many variations of this software under different names to meet different needs like B2C and B2B.
   2. Zen Cart - a variation of oscommerce
   3. Magento

   (at this point it is important to let you know that you will need to read a lot prior to building your website. You will need to plan at list 1 hour a day to the website after it is built.)

Third, now you have you software picked out, found you a hosting company and now you want the site to look good.  You say you are not a graphic artist and do not have the money to hire one? No worry, there are sites that have many free templates like

1. Free Joomla Templates
   1. SiteGround
   2. Joomla24
2. Premuim Joomla Templates
   1. Template Monster
   2. RocketTheme

You get the idea. You can go to Google.com and do a search for free themes or premium themes to find sites.

Alright lets wrap this up. You say you do better being able to see how to do things than reading a bunch of manuals. No problem. You have a wealth of help on the internet.  Lets jump over to YouTube and get started.

I would recommend getting your own YouTube account. That way, when you find videos you like you can subscribe or favorite them so you do not have to search every time you go to YouTube. Once on the YouTube site just type in what you are looking for like, Joomla, osCommerce, etc.

Here is an example of what you can find.

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