Create Simple One Page Site

The easiest way to create a simple one page site is by sitting down and drawing something up on one piece of paper.

Of course you may find that is not such an easy thing to do, if you have never done it before.

Learning to write is nothing more than doing it over and over again until you get it right or give up. If you do give up and go do something else better for your business, or whatever you are trying to write about, at least consider finding a proficient writer who can help.

Do you need a great software program to help you refine your writing technique?

Write the Title and give a brief description of what will be on the page.

Of course it is assumed that you are either trying to sell your business, your product, your service or yourself, so your title and description should be somewhat specifically related to business, product, service or you.

While it is not a mistake to elaborate or provide detail about things as you write, getting too detailed too soon can slow you down, right from jump street. Don’t let that happen. Stay on topic with your titles and be as brief as possible with a description.

If you find yourself drifting into other ideas or areas with your thoughts, do keep writing it down, as much and as quickly as possible.

The odds are, you are not going to remember things later, so writing down as much as you can now, is always a good idea. We are working from scratch here and you can always go back and reorganize your writing, unless you want to remember it all and reorganize it your head, before you write it down!

If you have ever written anything before, then you aware that what you are writing must flow from top to bottom nicely so things make sense. You start with a topic (aka title) and provide a couple of sentences in your opening paragraph, to sort of sum things up, that you intend to write about (aka description).

Some categorical questions of importance to keep in the back of your head are who, what, why, where, when and how.

Almost anything you will ever write will answer these questions for readers (aka site visitors). Qualify each of these categories for your topic.

For example talk about who you are and what you have (business, product, service). State why what you have (aka testimony) is important to you and why it is important to visitors. If you have some testimonies that you are allowed to use, from friends or customers you have helped, then by all means, add them too.

The nice thing about one web page sites is that you can create them as you go and make them as long as necessary.

By using sheets of paper to initially write things down, you can naturally limit yourself to what can squeeze on one sheet. As long as you stay somewhat logical with your flow of content on each of your sheets of paper, organizing information for your site page is a little easier to manage. The overall creation of the content on your page will always be available at any given time, just in case a search engine that likes your unique content, happens to stop by.

What other things should you put on your page?

By providing contact information such as a phone number or email address you are showing your page visitors how to contact you.

When site visitors call you, use a nice brief introductory phone message, since you are setting the stage to qualify the response as a business prospect.

When site visitors send you an email at the email address on your page, you can have that email address automatically respond to them with the information you need to provide to them.

In that message, alert them that the message was received, tell them what is next, show them your hottest businesses to date and ask them to join any mailing lists you may be running.

When site visitors opt in to your email list, make sure the initial message they get is clear.

Oh this was supposed to be a simple one page site. Well you don’t have to create an auto-responder message but you should put that on your to-do list.

As far as the phone message, well “Hello this is …. Please leave a brief message and the best time to contact you. Thank You”.

Okay now that you have scratched out something, how do you publish it to the Internet?

Open Office Documents can be saved as html pages.

Get a domain name and a hosting account for your domain.

Upload your page using FTP or any access method offered by your hosting company.

What else must you consider when creating your first page or adding to it later?

If you are going to place advertising on your pages, be sure to create a privacy policy page for your site.

If you are going to sell site memberships, products or services directly to consumers, be sure to create a terms of service page and update your privacy policy page accordingly. Adding an income disclaimer page is a very good thing to do right about now too.

Note too that whatever you publish is your publicly available material and it is considered your copyrighted material at the moment of publication. This also means you would eventually need to file a copyright for the material within a certain amount of time following publication, usually a year, if you expect to protect and defend your right to compensation for the life of your authored works. But this is another topic altogether and you should check with an attorney who specializes in copyright law and publishing on the Internet

Let’s stay on topic and move to the sub-topic of a disclaimer for the material published at this site. All material is for your reading and enjoyment only and is the property of various authors, publishing on the Very Small Business sites. Linking to or referencing these publications is fine. Copying and pasting published information and using it as your published information is a violation of copyright.  Copying and pasting for your own personal reference is fine too, as long as you do not use the originally copied material for any commercial purposes, at least until you rewrite it, for your own commercial work. Usually, if you rewrite information that you understand or have experience with, and use the reference information you collect on a topic to help you, then the final product is your own work.

If you are not sure whether you can republish something, all requests for republication will be considered as long as you ask first and do it later, with author approval.