You can learn about Dreamweaver at: http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/ There is even a free trial option, so you can sample software. And no, I’m not earning any affiliate commissions by recommending this to you.

Dreamweaver will have far more features than you can possibly wrap your mind around at first. The trick is to use any tutorials included with software, plus any free online tutorials (do a google search) and teach yourself how to create simple, clean web pages at first. Then you can gradually learn about other features, such as using tables, more complex formatting, etc.

From now on, as you surf web, bookmark sites you like or designs you like, and keep them in a special folder as examples you’d like to model. There’s no faster or better way to learn than by modeling success.

Launch your freelance web design practice by building your own website with Dreamweaver. If you have Internet access, your Internet provider already gives you from 5-10 MB of web space as part of your subscription. So you can practice on your first website there, at no additional cost.

For an initial investment of $399, you can become an expert using a professional tool. Once you're confident enough, build your own business site, with your own domain name, and promote your services as a web designer. I recommend using www.godaddy.com to register your new company’s domain name and host your site. It can cost you less than $50 a year to do both.

You can get a professional-looking logo for your business for $25 from www.gotlogos.com What other business can you launch for under $500 that has potential to earn tens of thousands of dollars per year?

And finally, purists and experts still suggest that you eventually become somewhat familiar with HTML, even if you use a WYSIWYG editor that hides all that HMTL code. Many professionals go in and "tweak" their web pages by hand, using HTML, to get exactly look they want.

There are some free tutorials available to learn about HTML. Check out: A beginner's guide to HTML: http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimerP1.html And http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/

The ability to create attractive, simple and functional web pages is a highly sought-after skill. Once you have created your own site showcasing a few examples of your work, your first prospects will probably be small businesses, consultants, and retail establishments in your area. Then, with experience, you can start doing work for larger companies. There’s another benefit, too. You can work for anyone, anywhere, anytime, around world, from your comfort of your home office.

Now you want to think about how you will market your home based business. Again, you can have best product and/or service going, but it won’t do you any good if you don’t market it. You need a marketing strategy for your home based business, and you need to plan for costs involved in making it a reality. You may only be thinking about flyers, circulars and posters to begin with, but they do cost money to produce. And you need to think about other ways as well. Radio, billboards, direct mail, email, Web advertising are all great ways to promote and market your product and/or service. It’s wise to do some research into what type of marketing tools work best for your type of home based business and use a combination of offline and online advertising. You may want to start with more inexpensive marketing methods and work up as you go. To do this, you’ll need to, yes, plan for that. Plan for how much you can spend at beginning and how much you want to add to your home based business marketing as it grows—which, with proper planning, it will certainly do.

Charles Fuchs http://www.charlesfuchs.com http://www.workathomesociety.com

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