Let me give you some free advice on website promotion (how to get decent search engine placement, etc.) and several warnings on website design and development including: never have any one person do your website unless the website is just a hobby. No one has all the skills necessary to do the job right. An artist is going to build a lovely site, but the site he/she designs may not be as usable or as promotable (with the search engines) as it should be. Just as my sites aren't as interesting to look at as they would be if an artist designed them --- I am obviously not an artist or a designer. I also do not have high level programming skills that would be necessary to build a shopping cart that could be used by 99.999% of all the people on the web and nothing less should be put up. Some web developers put up sites that can only be used on a WinTel machine running Internet Explorer. Who would give up 15% of their possible customers?

But this site is not about how a website looks or how it functions. It is about how it will do in the Search Engines, and how usable it is. You must make sure that your artist and programmer also follows these warnings so that when your lovely site is used, it will be found and be able to be used by everyone!

And what is becoming more and more obvious is that to Google "Content is King". You can follow all the warnings and rules I give you but if you don't have anything useful to say, you will never do well for competitve terms at least in Google. Give away good advice, keep it up-to-date (something I sometimes fail to do here which is why I provide for each page the date it was last updated).

In this site, you will find:

• The 13 Lucky Steps to Promoting a Website (most of which you can do on your own and you should know even if you hire someone to do this for you for this information could help you avoid problems)
• Resources for Further Research. Recommendations for books and other websites and reviews of some of them.
• Warnings & Advice on Designing & Promoting a Website
  Be Warned by B.E. Warne
  (it may not look like I know much about design but I am a usability & promotion expert (since 1996) and my advice on design could keep you from making major mistakes in this field --- but you would never want to hire me to design your site!).
• About the person who created this site.