This is one of the things I get most excited about — the way the Internet has given anyone the ability to have an idea, act on it, and build a business.

Great work Harjit!

Frankly I prefer Wordpress for that kind of work. There are lots of themes available for free; and you can get great themes for a small amount of money, too (like the ones at ithemes).

But many smart people (like you) prefer Joomla. So I think it is a matter of personal preference.

Ray

Because I’ve used your services in the past, I have no problem with you making that offer here.

I use both the shopping cart and the autresponder, by the way. The reason is three-fold:

1. I like having redundant systems. You know… not having all the eggs in one basket, that sort of thing.

2. One many shopping cart systems that include autorespodners, the deliverability of the “prospect” emails is not as good as the deliverability of the “customer” emails. It gets kind of technical, so I’m not going to go into it here; suffice it to say that in my experience this is the case.

3. Because I use aWeber, I get great deliverability to my “prospect” lists.

Thanks for dropping by — and for the offer to my readers.

About a year ago, you asked me how good I was at web design. I answered that I’d rather leave a lot of that stuff to someone else.

I bring this up because I’ve discovered a neat shortcut to needing a webmaster/designer in many cases.

It turns out that there are hundreds of very high quality (professional) designs that you can use for - the best price of all - FREE (I can use that word in a blog, can’t I?

The secret is to bootstrap your website up through Joomla, which comes free with many hosting packages. Joomla rocks because it neatly spits your site into two parts - content and the design, or look of the site.

The content gets typed right into the site using a built in word processor. You don’t need to learn Frontpage, Dreamweaver or any other separate editor.

Now, here’s the really neat part. Just google “Free Joomla templates” and you can go browsing through hundreds of professional looking templates.

Find one you like, then upload it to your Joomla site. Instantly, your site takes on that look! Don’t like it? Simply load up another template instead. It might take you a bit of hunting to find one you like, but it’s easy, fun work. The only tricky part is that you might not like the default graphic at the top.

You can pay someone to make you a different one, and probably get them to change out the default graphic as well. Hint: you can right click and select properties to find the file name for that graphic.

Another shortcut is that you can attach a shopping cart, which can also be free, to the Joomla as well. Admittedly, it won’t be as sophisticated as, say Amazon, but you shouldn’t be trying to compete with Amazon anyway.

Even if you are a rank beginner and have somebody help you set up your Joomla based site, you’ll still end up saving a lot of time and money by being able to do much more of the work yourself compared to a traditional HTML site.

Now you’ve got my secret as well as to how I create really sharp looking sites for clients in a couple of hours, including some of the content.

- Mike

About delivery: I like to read things, so I’m glad you’re writing it up on your blog in addition to having the audio.

As for audios, I prefer them to be straight downloadable MP3’s. For some reason, I can’t get iTunes to work right because of some intelliboard crash that mixed up my iTunes account

MP3’s work for me though. Or listening to it right on your blog — if your audio is short! But I always like the visual too.

Thanks.

Elisabeth

If your starting out it’s easier to get a wordpress blog set up, get your domain name and hosting ( make sure the hosting has fantastico scripts enabled) you can choose a custom theme for a blog probably less than $50 or choose one of the many free ones and get moving.

If you go for the website route and working with designers if your a newbie you could get taken to the cleaners and end up wasting a lot of time.

I’ll get a wordpress blog set up very quickly and do it for $150 including the first years hosting.

Apologies for the shameless plug but I think that’s the right thing to do and to get someone to do it for you. Sure you can learn but you end up wasting time doing that.

Gavin