Recommended Hosting Providers
There are many good hosting providers around. But rather than bewilder you with an array of choices, here are the two I personally recommend: Panthur and Dreamhost.
Both hosting services offer excellent value for your web hosting needs. Dreamhost is US based and is suitable if your website caters for the international (beyond Australasia) market.
Australia: Panthur
If your business is predominantly catering for Australia then you want an Australia-based hosting provider. The one that I personally use and recommend is Panthur. They provide fantastic hosting value for money, including the best support I’ve ever dealt with.
US: Dreamhost
Dreamhost has a very friendly feel to it and also automatically updates WordPress blogs for you when the time comes. Keeping your WordPress up to date is extremely important from a security stand point. Dreamhost also seems to provide faster servers than comparable US hosting providers (my experience – I tried a few). I’ve also had excellent support experiences throughout – prompt, knowledgeable and courteous.
HTML Reference and Tutorials
Free HTML Reference: http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
Free Visual/HTML web editor:
http://www.treyedit.com
Keyword and Domain research
Google Keyword Tool – Free
If you are wondering which keywords to target, the Google keyword tool is a great place to start. Simply type in a keyword you are thinking of or even the website of your competitor, and the Google Keyword Tool will show you what search terms it believes are relevant.
The Google Keyword Tool provides ideas for keywords you may want to target in your web pages. It indicates traffic
volume and level of competition for the keyword and their traffic volume for Google Search.
Note that the numbers provided by the tool are very rough, and the level of competition is just the overall estimate and does in no way indicate the strength of the current top-ranked sites. Nonetheless, it’s a great start:
Google keyword tool
Email Auto-responder Service
There are a few really good email auto-responder services out there.
The top four are probably Aweber, GetResponse, iContact and Mailchimp. Mailchimp gives you the most value when you’re starting out, because you can set up your mailing list and start sending newsletters for free. It’s hard to compete with ‘free’. Note that on the free mailchimp plan you basically just send newsletters. You don’t get to use any form of autoresponder automation and several other important features.
If you are planning to grow a list larger than 2,000 subscribers or want to make use of more professional features it is time to move away from mailchimp.
You can’t really go wrong with any of the other three services I listed here, but my personal favourite is GetResponse. I used all of them, and what swung me to use GetResponse was their great user interface, easy audience segmentation and their powerful automation tools.
Here are the links: