Web designers and developers are the foundation of the Internet. If you are skilled in web design or web development you can make a growing income on the Internet. The secret to making money with your web design and development skills is to include web hosting in your web design or web development quotes or standard packages.

You can add $50 a month to your income, hosting your client sites with more ease. You don’t need to get a dedicated server and you don’t need to worry about trying to compete with web hosting companies. What most people think is just getting a website up. They contact the web designers first, without really knowing that there are web designers and web hosts. Terms with “web designer”get more searches per day than terms with “hosting”. People are looking for web designers to get their sites on the Internet.

Web designers and developers can incorporate the sale of hosting into their web development and design projects. As a web designer you can bill your customers for the hosting fees within the design and then host the account for a year or on a month to month basis. You will be surprised at how much extra income you can generate from your web design customers.

Providing hosting for your web design clients will give you greater assurance that your customers will come back to you to make changes or update their site. This allows you to keep generating income from your work and customer base. Let’s look at some numbers, and how billing for hosting on top of your web design work can make you some serious money. Let’s assume you get paid $500 – $1000+ for a site design. If you charge your client for hosting as well you could generate up to $50 extra per site, per month in hosting fees. You could make up to $1100 to $1600 per site, per year instead of just $500 or $1000 per site. With 100 clients this could equate to $110,000 or $160,000 per year instead of $50,000 – $100,000 per year. On top of this, remember your client is more likely to come back to you to update and maintain your site which means more money for you, for easy work.

With a little effort and focus you could generate a very healthy income in your web design business. With tools like Joomla, WordPress and other highly customizable content management systems you can make the hard work incredibly efficient so you can focus solely on the design. Right now there are a myriad of powerful web applications, content management systems and shopping carts you can quickly install in your reseller web hosting account and produce a design for very quickly. There are also a myriad of ready to run, specialist applications written in ASP, ASP.Net and PHP that you can bolt on to your customers site, customize the design for and really impress your them. With these easily installable web applications you can very quickly impress your customers and raise the value of your web design fees – and the fact that they are specialist customized web applications you have put together, your web design customer will be happy to pay your hosting fees.

For your design business you don’t need anything fancy, you don’t need dedicated servers or specialists billing or server management systems. You can utilize the cost efficiencies of shared hosting to maximize your profit. One way to do it and a lot of designers do this, is get a new shared hosting account for each site they design and charge the customer more than they pay.

The better way to do it and really maximize your profit is to get a reseller hosting account where you can host all your customer sites in the one hosting account. This works out much cheaper than getting a separate account for each customer site. A good reseller account will give you far more room to move and even greater cost effectiveness which means even more profit and less effort.

Getting up and running with a good reseller hosting account is easy and incredibly affordable. For just a few hundred dollars per year you can host 50 or more sites. A quick search on reseller hosting will give you plenty to choose from. In our experience Windows hosting reseller packages are a good idea as a Windows reseller hosting account will give you the freedom and choice to run ASP, ASP.Net as well as PHP sites with MySQL or SQL Server databases. Linux hosting is incredibly efficient and gives you some of the cheap hosting options available but does not support ASP or ASP.Net applications. For an extra few dollars a month you can get Windows hosting and dramatically increase your options for your web design customers from a wider array of available web applications and freely available code in ASP and ASP.Net.

With Windows hosting you can use all your favorite web design tools and you’ll have the vast resources of Microsoft development products like Visual Studio at your disposal. As a reseller looking at Windows hosting accounts make sure the host offers Multiple IIS sites and not just unlimited domains. To properly host multiple sites on Windows each site needs to have it’s own entry in IIS (Internet Information Server – the Windows web server). Many hosts say unlimited domains and what they really mean is running unlimited domains on one site. All you get with unlimited domains on one site, is your multiple domains show the same site or requires you to write code to detect the domain and redirect to a directory. This is not a great way to run your customer sites.

With each site having it’s own entry IIS means you can have separate application settings, assign it to different application pools and maintain separate log files. This means you can have more control, more flexibility and produce a much better solution for your client. Being able to put your customer sites in separate application pools means that if one of your customer sites get’s busy or some crazy bug causes a problem it will isolate it to just that site and you wont end up with all your customers screaming at you that their sites are down.

After 12 years working on the internet. Through booms, through busts, good times and bad times web designers and developers quietly rule the web. Businesses of all sizes look for web designers first and in our experience they really don’t want to know too much about hosting. As a designer you can save your clients from the complexity and confusion of hosting and make money from it. To make money from hosting your client work you really don’t need to leap out and set yourself up as a web hosting provider with billing systems, hosting plans and support systems and processes. Start off by hosting all your sites in one reseller hosting package and you’ll be surprised at just how much extra money you can make for very little effort. The best thing of all you can keep your focus on why you became a web designer – designing web sites!

Developing good web design habits can save you and your clients a lot of time and money. In this article, we offer some simple tips and strategies that help form good web design habits for the life.

Avoid using tables and rely on CSS for layout. Using tables can limit your layout options and may not always display the same in the various browsers causing cross-browser compatibility issues. Tables can be hard to manage while CSS allows you to manage the entire look of your site with just a few lines of code. Less code means faster load times as there is less code for the browser software to interpret.
Document your work. When managing multiple sites, it is easy to lose track of where you left off and what you were thinking at the time. Commenting your code helps you remember, but also in the event you hire extra help, your assistant will understand your work easier saving time. Keeping organized is one of the best habits you can form.
Make Backups Don’t lose you hard work or what other people have paid for. Make a backup of the websites, databases, files, and everything else when developing a website. Backup every change. It may sound like tedious work but mistakes happen and are often costly.
Keep It Simple Creating a complex layout can make a site confusing and hard for the end-user to find what they are looking for. Too many interactive features and graphics can make the site load slowly creating accessibility issues. Balance is key. Too much of any one thing is not a good thing so keep it simple by providing just enough text, graphics and an easy to follow navigation system. Remember the goal is to make a website beautiful (and beauty is in the eye of the beholder e.g., the client) and easy to use.
Validate your code Keep your code clean. This is another good habit to form. Use the free W3C validation service to find the areas that need correction and do this for both HTML and CSS. Adding the validation buttons to your site show that the website’s code is well formed and a mark of quality.
Naturally Search Engine Friendly (SEF) SEO is a part of web design too. When you add an image to a page it should have an alt tag to go along with it. This is a part of developing and optimizing a website while it is under construction. An experienced web designer will add the Title, Meta Tags, image attributes, and structure the links and content to be search engine friendly as part of the design.
Compatibility Websites should be accessible across as many platforms, browsers, and screen resolutions as possible. If you design your site with CSS that works with all browsers, avoid browsers scripts and Flash, and keep within an 1024×768 screen setting, you will be in good shape (some will argue that 800×600 is still the standard but we are designing for the future here). Also, another idea is to make your website mobile having a desktop and mobile version. For interactive features, try using server side scripts and programming that will keep your site compatible for everyone.

When you talk about the list of priorities of people around the world, you may encounter big differences among different cultures. Some people in other parts of the world value family ties more than anything else. Other people cherish and give utmost importance to career and personal development. Others believe that above all, religion must be the number one priority. Still others believe that love and relationships should be at the top of everybody’s list. Despite some clear differences among people in different parts of the world, there is one thing that everyone does consider as very important – if not THE most important aspect of all. While it may be true that different people have different priorities in life, it is also true that they all value their health. Thus, to make things easier for every one of us, here are a few health Tips that might come in handy. Read on to learn more about these tips.The most vital of all health Tips is to quit smoking and drinking. These are two of the biggest killers among both men and women. Another tip is to keep moving as much as possible. If you can walk to your work or school, then skip your car and the city taxis. Another tip is to avoid eating fat that is beyond the daily requirement. Fat is important for our daily nutrition. However, too much of it will also hurt us.Without good health, people cannot do the things they want. They cannot take care of their career, family, practice their faith, and everything else that life can offer. Take care of your health beginning today. It is never too late.