FamilyEbiz

Sorry to be so tardy with this latest edition, but I have either been preaching at church or speaking at a home school conference almost every weekend in May and June. It has been tiring, but it has given the Beck family a lot of time to spend together on the road. Since our kids are involved in our home school curriculum business, they get to learn entrepreneurial skills as we travel.

My son, Hunter, has caught the entrepreneurial bug with all the marshmallow guns and potato cannon kits he is selling at the home school conferences. If your child shows an interest in entrepreneurial endeavors, by all means encourage him or her, even if they are not making a huge profit at first. All successful businessmen have to start somewhere and what better place than under your watchful eye where the consequences are not so severe? Very few businessmen wind up settling down with the first business they ever started. Most go through a few to find the one that is right for them.

If you are interested a talk I recorded entitled, Teaching Your Children To Start Their Own Business

In the talk, we cover the biblical reasons for owning your own business, the pros and cons of having your own business, the types of businesses, marketing, knowing your numbers, calculating price, employees vs. subcontractors, simple businesses to start…plus a whole lot more!

Biblia:

Deuteronomy 15:1
At the end of every seven years you shall grant a release of debts. And this is the form of the release: Every creditor who has lent anything to his neighbor shall release it; he shall not require it of his neighbor or his brother, because it is called the LORD'S release.

God had a unique way of keeping His people free from long-term debt. How many 30 year mortgages do you think the Israelites had? What do you think the banks would do if all debt was to be forgiven in the seventh year? We would all have six year mortgages! (Actually, many obedient Christians do not have mortgages at all!) What about the credit card companies? They would allow substantially less unpaid balances because they would have only six years to bleed you dry with exorbitantly high interest payments! God instituted this Jubilee year (Lev 25:28) to keep His people out of enslaving power of debt and to remind them of the freedom He gives to His people. He wanted them to be free to serve Him, not the other nations. He was after their time perspective as well. He wanted His children to focus on the task at hand, instead of mortgaging their futures by yearning after the things of this world.

Not only are we to keep ourselves free from debt, we are not to cosign or become surety for others...not even our children. What better way to teach them voluntary slavery than to lead them by the hand and help them buy something they can not afford. If they could afford it, why else would they need your guarantee?! Better to teach them to do without for the time being and wait on God’s timing, than to willingly submit to the chains of debt. Notice the verse immediately following perhaps the most quoted verse on child rearing:

Prov 22:6-7
Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.

One of the things we are to train our children in is the principle that debt leads to enslavement. We are not our own, for we were bought with a price - we belong to God. Proverbs 17:18 could not make it any more plain...you are devoid of understanding (stupid) if you cosign a note!

An excerpt from A Quick Study On Debt, by Stephen Beck
For more information on this book, click on the link above.

Practica:

So far we have talked about:

Researching the market to see if our topic is something others want.
Getting a web hosting account.
Finding a product to sell using ClickBank.

Of course, selling a product on your website presupposes that you have a website. So let me go through the steps and then give you my recommendations. (Jim Bob, you are not allowed to snicker at anything I have written here!)

First, you need a hosting company to host your website (see my recommendations HERE). A hosting company “rents” you a spot on their server and just like a rental, apartment, the bigger the spot, the more you pay. Don’t worry about a big spot right now. Most beginner websites are fairly small. Next, you will need a domain name which is like an address for your rented spot. My advice is to get the domain name from the same place you rent your spot, the hosting company (again, I have covered all this in tip #2 news-letter).

After you have your domain name and your hosting company, your address and apartment, now you will want to move in. So, you will need to decide whether to decorate from scratch, use a decorator kit or hire someone to do the decoration for you. Hiring someone to decorate for you is expensive, but it is easy, so I will not spend much time on that.

If you want to decorate from scratch, you will need to learn html code. Most web pages are written in this code and it takes a long time to master all of the intricacies. The html code determines the text, the pictures, the spacing of the various elements, the links, in short…everything that is on a web page is determined by the html code. A great place to start for learning html code is here:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Overview.html

Now, I like to decorate myself, but I don’t like reinventing the wheel. I mean, why find gooseberries to squeeze and make my own paint, when I can buy a can of paint at the paint store? And even if I have to pay for the paint, it is still a lot cheaper than hiring a painter! Similarly, if I can find a web page program that will write the code for me, I can still do it myself and save some money. But knowing some html can be helpful. I may not know all the ingredients that go into a can of paint, but if I am familiar with the properties of different kinds of paints, it will help me in the long run. Knowing a little html can help you understand what the web page programs are doing behind the scenes and sometimes you may have to use a little code to get exactly what you want. So my advice, is to at least go through the tutorials mentioned above, but you may not want to memorize everything.

When it comes to web page programs, there are a bunch out there, but most work on the WYSIWYG principle…what you see is what you get. So, they allow you to type and arrange pictures just like a word processor or desktop publishing program, while the web page program is writing code behind the scene. In fact, many of these programs allow you to switch to “html code view” so that you can see what you are writing looks like in html code. This is also a great way to learn a little html code. Kind of like learning Greek from an interlinear Bible…the English translation is right below the corresponding Greek word.

A web page is just one page. A website is a collection of web pages. When you go to a site, like www.curriculumconnection.net, you will land on the index page. That page will introduce the website and have navigation buttons on the left to other pages in the site, which in turn will have links to still other related pages in the site. A navigation button is just a fancy link that takes you to like-minded pages. Of course, you can have a separate link to any other page in your site or even to another website. The reason I say all of this is that it is a good idea to sketch out a map of your site before starting so that you can group related subjects together.

The main draw back to web page programs is their lack of flexibility. Some programs are template driven and only allow you to fill in the blanks. It is very fast and easy, but you do not have a lot of control over what your page will look like. Others are very flexible, but have a steep learning curve. Let me demonstrate what I mean by giving the pros and cons of several web page programs.

Microsoft Frontpage

I started with this program against the recommendation of my brother. I wanted something easy and I was in a hurry. I used one of the templates in the program, but did not find out until later that when you use the template, Frontpage places some important information in other files. So, when I have become more advanced and want to control the look at little more, the template will not let me. I have fought with Frontpage for so long over this, that I recommend not using Frontpage on the bottom of every page on my website! (So much for small, personal victories!) Actually, I have found that Frontpage can be very versatile if you do not use the templates they provide, but I already have 160 pages in my site, so I will not be changing over anytime soon. Another problem with Frontpage is that your web host has to have certain programs to run a Frontpage web site and sometimes will charge you extra. Webmasters and web hosts do not like Frontpage!

All that said, Frontpage is still the webdesign program I use the most, but I DO NOT use the pre-made templates.

Macromedia Dreamweaver

Being frustrated with Frontpage, I started my other sites on Dreamweaver. This time I did not use the templates and have been very happy with it. I have yet to figure out the library and local-site functions of this program, but I have found a lot more people who can help me with Dreamweaver than with Frontpage. Both Dreamweaver and Frontpage are pricey, so you may want to download a trial version to make sure it is your cup of tea. Homeschoolers can use their education card at Hastings to be a substantially reduced price for both of these programs, but you are not allowed to use it for business purposes. But it would be a great way to learn or to have your children learn.

Teach your children to design websites and they can kiss that $2/hour babysitting job goodbye! Business owners do not care how old the designer is as long as the page works. Most web designers charge between $25 to $65/hr depending on what they are doing. Web designing allows very flexible hours and there is always someone who needs a page designed. I have two sites that I am supposed to design, but can not get to at this very moment!

Yahoo Site Builder

Free, but somewhat limited in its ability. Would be a good place to learn. Start with the templates.

Here is a list of other free web page programs: http://www.thefreesite.com/Free_Software/HTML_freeware/

Once you design a web site, you will need to upload it to the server…the place you have rented from your web host. Most programs have an automatic upload button, but alas they quit working or are too slow (of course, my Frontpage upload button has quit working!). Other times, you may want to upload certain pages while leaving others alone. To do this you need an ftp program…which stands for file transfer protocol. It works very similarly to your windows explorer program where you drag files from one window to the other. So, open the ftp program, connect to your website and drag the files over that you want to upload. It is that easy!

Of course, I have just skimmed the mountain tops. There are many great resources out there that will let you delve deeper. A great series at Hastings is the Master Visually series on just about any popular software program you can name. They are easy to understand, with lots of pictures and screen shots. Unfortunately, I find the tutorials that come with the programs to be very difficult to understand.

Warmly in Christ,

Stephen Beck
www.familyebiz.com
www.curriculumconnection.net
email: steve@familyebiz.com

Click Here for Tip #5