The following are beginner ideas for those researching effective web design and marketing:

- Selling Something Direct? Use An Uncomplicated Means Of Purchase. An intermediary service like PayPal is perfectly effective to start with. If you have just a small number of products, their HTML buttons are a good way to test the waters. When you bring in over $1000 a month, acquire a merchant account of your own.

- Make A Better, Faster, Cheaper Version Of A Popular Product. You can walk a trail somebody else has blazed. You can learn from their errors. The only negative is that the competition will have first-mover advantage and brand-recognition. However, you can also use them to publicise your stuff e.g. "My SnarkWodger 2.1 is faster and cheaper than Big_Name_Brand"; cue controversy, which equals publicity.

- Post In Popular Discussion Boards And Blogs to kick your campaign off, if they'll let you use straight hyperlinks in your signature. This is a short-term measure if you want to acquire back-links. It's a long-term method if you want to sell to forum members.

- Set Up A Site In Minutes. Wordpress can be installed in minutes from the Fantastico section of Cpanel on a lot of webhosting accounts. It allows an amateur to put their ideas on the net easily. You then ought to acquire a search-engine optimised theme for it; this will make Google index it properly. Such softwares are free; you needn't pay for them.  

- Have More Than One Web Host. Have more than one net hosting account if you have a lot of websites. Spread the websites out over different accounts. That way, if one web host goes 'splat', it will be a small irritation instead of a twelve-hour slog getting twenty sites back online. You can put the resource-intensive stuff on the good, expensive host, and the subsidiary web sites on the $5 p.m. hosts. You can then, using SSH and FTP, backup one site on-server and FTP it to another account directly. This can save a lot of time. It's also much quicker than downloading a backup to your PC and re-uploading it somewhere else. Have you got a 2MB broadband internet connection? The 2MB is the theoretical _download_ speed. Ever try _uploading_ a fat file? A lot slower, isn't it?

- Useful Software: 1. Easy Text To HTML Converter. This software can batch convert text files to HTML. See also: dirHtml. WordCleaner can convert Microsoft Word documents to HTML. 2. WinSCP. This is a very clever piece of FTP software. 3. AXS Visitor Tracking System. A very fine hit counter. 4. Port 2096. If you have CPanel on your webhost, yourdomain.com:2096 is the internet address of your email accounts. 5. Netscape Communicator 4.8. This has a very effective email client (Netscape Messenger) and a handy freeware WYSIWYG HTML editor (Netscape Composer) in it.

- Submit Articles To Article Directories. What you require is a service or a software that will do this for you automatically. Submission by hand is fatiguing and time-consuming. Ask in web marketer discussion boards about the latest softwares and services.

- A Super-Simple Site In An Emergency: Use a text-to-html generator to create web pages from text files. Then use an index generator to make an index HTML page of these files. Tart these pages up in a WYSIWYG net page editor. Then FTP upload them to your webhosting account. Voila! A super-simple web site. Want something more complicated?  Get a net hosting account with Cpanel and Fantastico. Look for the 'Wordpress' option in Fantastico, and install it. Then get a search engine optimized theme for your blog; the default install isn't search-engine friendly.

I hope these few basic ideas will help you in getting worthwhile web design and marketing done simply.

About the author: N. Svengali is an author for web site design consultant UK and UK personal loans internet sites in London, UK.