Step 6: Create a payment acceptance method for your product or service. See Beginner’s Guide Payment options. If you have ever sold or bought anything on eBay you have probably heard of PayPal. From beginners to pros it is one very easy, hassle free payment option that most everyone is familiar with. It allows you to accept credit card payment without going through the hassle of a traditional credit card processor. Signup is free.

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If you are using Xsite Pro as your website authoring program PayPal integration is built in to make it even easier to implement.

Step 7: Once you have created your website, it’s very simple to upload it to your host. You can get more information at our Beginner’s Guide to Uploading a website as well.

Most web design programs have an upload device which is called FTP or File Transfer Protocol. It’s not important to understand how it works but how it needs to be set up. XSitePro for example has a built in FTP so does Adobe Dreamweaver,(  ) and just about all of the top web design programs. If you are using a basic html editor chances are that you will need an FTP program. There are many on the market however you don’t need to pay for one as you can get a top of the line FTP program for free. Filezilla is a free download and it’s probably one of the easiest and best FTP programs I have ever used. Go To http://filezilla-project.org/

All you really need to know about FTP is:

• The sign-on or user name of your account, this is usually sent to you after you have set up your hosting account so don’t lose it.
• The password you set up or that you were given. Don't lose this either.
• The folder you want to upload your site to. If this is your main site you will upload it to the root file. That’s anything in the public.html folder of your hosting account. If you don’t specify a folder you automatically load into the root. It sounds hard but it isn’t.

Just be sure, if you are using an html editor, that you have defined your home page as the index.html page otherwise your host will not know which is the home page of the site.

If you are using a product such as XSitePro you don’t have to worry about this because Xsite Pro will automatically define the home page for you.

Once you get all of your files into one folder you can upload them using your FTP program to your host. Just be sure that you upload them into the public.html section of your hosting account.

That’s about it. One more thing, when you register your domain name and set up the nameservers as I outlined above, it may take 24 hours for your domain to move over to the new nameservers. This is referred to as propagating and it sometimes can take as much as 24 hours.