Promoting yourself online – Part One

Before the advent of the internet, self-promotion and job seeking efforts are mainly through the medium of the snail mail.
However, in this digital and internet age, you can expand your job seeking endeavours by very quickly broadcasting yourself to an online audience, without the need to wait for the information to be disseminated via conventional paper methods such as snail mailing.

In this article, we will talk about setting up a website inexpensively to promote yourself and to enhance your chances of employability.

In the past, setting up a website used to be a rather costly. However, things have changed dramatically.

You can register a .com domain for a yearly fee of about 10 bucks per year.

Next, you will need to get a web host. Because of stiff competitions, web hosting packages are also relatively cheap nowadays. You can easily get reliable website hosting for as little as a few bucks a month.

Once you have bought the domain name and web host, the next thing that you need to do is to build the site. If this is your first foray into web site building, you may not want to invest too much money in the acquiring of tools for web design and creation.

We have compiled some free software tools are can be used for the web creation tasks.

1. Kompozer – free software for web design and editing. This programs allows you to create web pages without the need to understand the underlying programming and markup language code. This software has an interface that is fairly easy to understand. Below is a screenshot of Kompozer.

2. GIMP – powerful image editing tool for web graphics. You will need to use this program to optimizes the size and dimensions of images to be used on your website. Below is a screenshot of GIMP.

3. Filezilla – free tools for uploading files onto the web host. You will need to use Filezilla as an FTP tool to transfer your files and images created unto your web host.

With these free tools, you should be able to create pretty web sites to promote yourself and showcase your work experiences. You can even put your resume as a webpage for prospective employers to view and print.