How to Sell your Website

There are hundreds and thousands of websites on internet today being bought and sold and there are many places you can sell your website such as ebay and website brokers. Though this article we will explore each of these possibilities in greater details.

Ebay - Selling a website on ebay can perfect for some and completely useless for others. As most people know ebay, it gets millions of hits every minute from people looking for everything from hair nets to race cars. For starters this is a great way to get word out that your website is for sale. It has lots of people viewing your ads but keep in mind your competition is feirce as so many people post sites for sale on ebay. To sell your website on ebay it has to stand out from rest.

Forums - Forums tend to be a great place to sell websites. They tend to ask alot more questions about statistics and revenue than most other places but if you have a quality site you can sometimes get alot more for it buy selling your website in forums. Good forums for this include sitepoint.com, geekvillage.com and webhostingtalk.com.

Website Brokers - Website brokers normally go out and try to get you best possible price for your website. They tend to have contacts in industry and will get into contact with people you can't or dont even know exist. They generally charge a fee of around 10%-15%. There are a few websites around where you can post your website up to brokers - kind of like a cross between ebay and a brokers firm.

Designing Your Website's Directory Structure

By Stephen Bucaro

Any kid, and their grandmother too, can make a webpage. There are many "wysiwyg" webpage design applications that let you create a webpage as easy as typing text. But only a few people can create a WEBSITE. The stumbling block is knowing how to link webpages together to form a website. I have seen many websites that consist of a single webpage - about a mile long!

The first problem is that websites are contained in virtual directories. You know that your webpages can be found at yourdomain.com, but actual path to yourdomain.com on web server may be known only by system administrator. And system administrator can move your website to a different folder, or even a different computer, without changing its virtual address.

The second problem is that most people don't know how to write a relative link. Relative links have advantage that you don't need to know path to webpage that you want to link to, you only need to know where it is "relative" to webpage containing link.

Designing Your Directory Structure

The first step to implementing a website is to design directory structure. Let's design a directory structure for a simple download website. The website consists primarily of articles and digital material that visitors can download. You could just dump everything at top level of website. Good luck maintaining that website!

To keep files organized, you need to create sub-directories (folders) on website. Even though website consists only of articles and digital downloads, you need five sub-directories, as described below.

- articles - downloads - general - common - cgi-bin

You understand what "articles" and "downloads" sub-directories are for, but what are other three sub-directories for? It's standard practice to provide certain features on your website, as listed below.

- About - Contact - FAQ - Privacy Policy - Search - Sitemap - User Agreement

Each of these features requires a webpage. Instead of dumping webpages at top level of website, or mixing them in with articles or downloads, let's put them together in a folder named "general" (I'm sure you can think of a better name).

All of your webpages use certain things in common, for example, your logo graphic. If your web server provides SSI (Server Side Includes) all your webpages can share a common header file and a common footer file. You might also define all your website's styles in a common style sheet. Let's put all of these files in a folder named "common".

Your contact page might use an email form. If your server provides server-side scripts, you would place email form script in a folder named "cgi-bin". Cgi-bin stands for "Common Gateway Interface - Binary". Few people use CGI any more, and those that do don't use binary files, but folder name has stuck as a traditional place to store scripts. Almost all websites come with a preconfigured cgi-bin folder, and website may be configured so that cgi-bin folder is only folder with rights to run scripts.