I’m going to walk you through getting your website up and running to reach your customers.

1. Get a domain name! Go to mydomain.com, networksolutions.com or any other domain name registrar you can find through Google. Begin to check for domain names that are appropriate for your company. You might have to get creative and think laterally to find one that is available for you. Add your city or blog or something else to the name to make it unique and easy to find/remember.
2. Now you need website hosting. There are dozens of places to use for web hosting, but some of the best that I have worked with are: HostGator & AN Hosting. I highly recommend both of these sites for their uptime, large servers and ease of use.
3. Next, you need to design a site and get it filled with some content. I would suggest using WordPress for your site’s backend management. Go to WordPress.org to learn about it. Search on Google or hit up a good friend of mine at wpblogger.com.
   • If you want to jump right in to setting up WordPress and playing with the features and if you used one of the hosts I recommended, it is really simple. Login to your control panel and look for Fantastico. Click on it, then on the left side of the screen should be a list of applications it can install. Click on WordPress and follow the instructions.
   • Now that you have WordPress installed, we need to find a theme. For ease of use, I would suggest looking for themes over at WooThemes. They have great support and spend a lot of time making their themes extremely user-friendly. A second option is ThemeForest. ThemeForest is a site where multiple developers come to sell their designs. Since ThemeForest is more of a broker, the support isn’t quite as good, but I have used some great themes there. For the more adventurous out there, Headway is a great theme for WordPress that allows you to customize the site yourself.
4. Phew! Domain is registered, we’ve got our hosting set up, WordPress is online. Now we need to add some content. Login to your WordPress site, click on Posts and get to work.
5. Good news, your site is up, bad news, it’s still hard to find. Subscribe to our blog to get constant updates and new tricks to get your site to rank higher in Google, Bing and other search engines.

It’s the best way to get good, clean content out on the web and make it accessible and easily readable for everyone. Keep everything as simple as possible. This does a number of things for you:

• Increases your productivity
• Increases your reader’s productivity
• Enhances SEO
• Creates a more enjoyable website to view

Think about it. If you keep your site really simple and informational, people might actually visit it as opposed to just your RSS feed. They’ll see your advertisements and more of your content.

My site, already on Page 1 of Google for the term Twitter Rocket, is nothing more than CSS and a few images. Actually, it’s all built off Headway which is one of the simplest WordPress themes I have ever used, but also the most powerful. It is easy to maintain, easy to write and exceptional at SEO.

Go look at www.drudgereport.com. It is arguably a very ugly site, yet it is simple and full of great content. According to www.websitegrader.com It scored an 88% and is in the top 0.01% of traffic on the internet.

If you’re still not convinced, then check out the guys at 37Signals, especially Backpack. It’s simple, clean and so easy to use. It fits the bill of probably 95% + of people and it isn’t complicated.

What do you think? Is simple really this important or is it overrated?