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ore and more people are getting laid off from work and are now looking into starting an online business from home. Why is this good for a web designer? Over the past year all I hear from my friends is how bad business is going and how the recession is hurting their sales. I never have anything to say. I have been running a small web design business for the past 3 years and the recession has only brought in more business. Those people who are getting laid off from work and are now starting a work-from-home business are potential clients for a web designer.

If you are a new web designer and do not know where to start, maybe I can help. USE CRAIGSLIST. Craigslist is a free online directory for everything from products to services. One of the categories listed in Craigslist's directory is Computer. Create and submit an add and you will start hearing the phone ring or your email box populate with inquries.

Notice: The technique I'm about to suggest is just to exercise my thoughts, it is against Craigslist terms and conditions and should not be used for spamming.

There are some good tricks when you use craigslist to list your advertisement. For example, use html to style the ad and to add pictures that are hosted on another site. An easy way to do this is pull up a website development software like Dreamweaver or Frontpage and in design view create an ad. I prefer Dreamweaver and if you appreciate quality and cleanliness, you will too. After you have designed your ad, switch over to code view and copy and paste the code into your Craigslist ad. If you are including pictures in your ad, make sure they are being hosted on a server and that there file path is correct.

After pasting your code into the Craigslist Ad, follow the neccessary steps to publish it. If you want to publish multiple ads but are being cut off by Craigslist, there is a trick for that too (Again - Against Craigslist Terms and Conditions). Although Craiglist changes what html code they accept from time to time to make it so people can't continue multi-posting. Basically, what you need do is browse through the computer category in Craigslist and find an ad that has a big gap at the bottom and take your cursor and highlight that area. If you see text appear that you did not see before, it is because the publisher of that ad hid the text with html styles. The publisher did this to be able to include text that has nothing to do with their ad, but to the bots that crawl craigslist and to the filter Craigslist has in place creates enough variation in that ad that it will be accepted by the system. So, a person can publish as many ads as the want as long as they continue to change the hidden text at the bottom.

What you should do is pull up two tabs in your browser. Open Wikipedia in one tab and open Craigslist in the other tab. Also open a blank notepad. Keep the code from your ad in the notepad and use it as a master copy so that you can use it each time before creating the ad. Find an ad like mentioned in the last paragraph where the publisher has used html to hide some text at the bottom. Take a look at the source code for that ad by going to "view" -> "source code" in firefox browser. Then go to "edit" -> "find" in your browser. Type in the first word that you saw in the hidden text. Your browser will take you down to the word and the snippet of code right before that word is what you want to use, it should start with <font> and at the end of the text you should see the </font> tab. Copy and paste the snippet of code into the bottom of your code in the notepad that you have up with your ad code. Each time you create an ad , make sure you include the closing </font> tag after the hidden text.

Here are the steps you should follow:
Copy and paste the code from the notepad into the Craigslist ad. Jump over to your Wikipedia tab and type in a random word, i.e. fish, food, chair, etc. and copy the first paragraph in the definition of the word. Paste what you have copied directly after your last snippet of code in your craigslist ad. This is the snippet of code that hides your text. DO NOT forget to close your tag </font>. Go through the publishing steps and your all set. IMPORTANT... Each time you create a new ad make sure to change the hidden text that you are pulling from Wikipedia.

What this does is it throws off the craigslist algorithm that filters out repetitive ads. If there is enough variation in the ad by including the hidden text, Craigslist lets the ad go through.

Craigslist is just one of the many web resources a new web designer should use. If you have not heard of Joomla, then you need to start learning. Joomla is an Open Source CMS (Content Management System). It will offer your clients the option to change text, move around elements on their site, and easily add features in the future. It is a great upsell option for you as well. Typically, website businesses will charge a few hundred dollars to build a site on the framework of a CMS. The fastest and best way to learn Joomla is here at O Joomla Training. Click here to get started, you will have access to over 60 Joomla Training Videos. It is soooooooo easy to learn Joomla with my Videos. Everything you will need to know will be shown to you in easy to follow narrated high resolution videos. I made them all. I'm authoring this blog and I'm the narrator of all of the videos. There are over 60 videos and new ones being added every week.



Directories and Blogs

Another way to advertise for free and happens to be very effective is to use free directories to submit your sites URL to. Just go to google and type in 'free directory submit' and filter through until you find a good directory that has a high scoring page rank. Something you will want to consider is the type of directory it is. Some are over-saturated with links to malicious or bad sites in the eyes of google. Be very careful with this because you could end up hurting your websites presence in the Internet than helping it. The value of the backlink to the respective advertisers website is much less valuable when its advertiser has thousands of listings per category. So I suggest finding a lot of small niche website directories and getting your link to your website in their directories.

A trick for-which will help if you are interested in submitting your website to blogs is to type into google the key-phrase that best suits your websites, such as 'car parts' and then following the key-phrase, type in captcha, so it should look like this 'car parts captcha'. This will allow you to filter out all the blogs, directories, and/or forums that don't have a comment submit application because it is through such applications that you will be able to submit a comment about your business and provide a backlink to your website for those interested.