The Internet has been a boon for parents who want to work at home, enabling them to set up shop and market themselves to a global audience - both quickly and cheaply.

In Part 1 of this series, we covered the steps to take in building a foundation for your online business: procuring a domain name and finding a host for your site. Now you're ready to:

BUILD THE FRAME

You need to make an important decision: who will be designing and maintaining your site.

The fastest way to get your business online is to hire a professional to a site for you. The cheapest way is to do it yourself. You need to assess the balance between your budget and your time.

Many web hosts offer design services as well as tools to help you put your pages together and get them up fast. This is a popular business for work at home parents and you'll find many listed in directories on sites like HBWM.com, En-Parent.com and Momsnetwork.com. Here are some of the accomplished designers who are listed in ParentPreneur's Member Business Directory:

http://www.laufers.com/idesign/
http://angel-art.net/
http://www.docutype.net/
http://www.effective-results.com/

If you are the hands-on type you may want to try designing your site yourself, and even if you do work with a designer, you should probably learn the basics so you can handle some of the maintenance. One of the sad truths most webmasters discover is that their sites are never finished. The immediacy of the World Wide Web ensures that you will always be discovering ways to improve and build upon the foundation you create.

If you have the aptitude for it, you would benefit from learning HTML and creating your site from scratch. But if you don't - and if time is a factor - there are plenty of wonderful programs out there that will enable you to create your site quickly (while learning HTML basics at your own speed).

These low cost programs are recommended by the users of cnet.com:

Site Bud - Try free for 21 days then pay $19.95 http://www.sitebud.com/

Coffee Cup: - Free trial version download - full featured version costs $49. http://www.coffeecup.com/editor/

Hot Dog Page Wiz: - 30-day free trial then pay $69.95 http://www.sausagetools.com/pagewiz/overview.html

Front Page - Microsoft's web design product is expensive, but easy to use. However, you can order a full-featured version for a 30-day trial for just $9.95: http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/evaluation/trial.htm The retail price of the full program is $169 ($89.95 for those upgrading from an earlier version).

Dream weaver - This is the favorite of professionals everywhere. The full program is currently priced at $299 but they do offer a free 30-day trial: http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/download/

We found a wonderful new training site that promises to teach you web design with Dream weaver and even emails you six video tutorials for free. The information in these videos is valuable even if you don't use Dream weaver to design your site:

http://parentpreneurclub.com/cgi-bin/ads/pl.cgi?dw

If you are a student, teacher or school administrator - or home school your kids - you may be able to obtain these programs at up to half price at http://www.AcademicSuperstore.com .

The high-end programs include an FTP (file transfer protocol) function to enable you to upload your pages to your host. Some hosts allow you to transfer your files while you are logged into your control panel. Many webmasters prefer to use a separate FTP program to handle this task (this comes in handy when you develop your skills to the point that you are installing your own CGI scripts). The most popular FTP programs are:

WS*FTP*LE - This limited edition FTP client may be all you need to handle uploading your pages to your site and it's FREE for non-commercial home users. http://www.ftpplanet.com/download.htm

Cute FTP - $39.95 - free 30-day trial http://www.cuteftp.com/products/cuteftp/index.shtml

Direct FTP - $30 - free 30-day trial http://www.coffeecup.com/directftp/

There are tons of online resources to help you get up and running with your website. My favorites include:

Web monkey: Great tutorials with a sense of humor. Check out their beginners' section. http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/frontdoor/beginners.html

CNet's Builder: If you see a cool effect and want to try it yourself, search for it here http://www.builder.com

Free Site Templates: Jumpstart your website by grabbing one of these professionally designed FREE templates - over 250 to choose from. http://www.freesitetemplates.com

You'll also get a lot of guidance by downloading any of the following from our Free e-Book Library:

HTML 4.0 Tutorial Web Development: Just the FAQs Dynamic Design (and its Relationship to Internet Marketing) Graphic Design Tutorial

http://parentpreneurclub.com/cgi-bin/ez/pl.cgi?me

Designing your site and getting it on the web is only half the battle. In Part 3 of this series, we will focus on what you need to do to get your site listed in search engines and directories.