I want to get involved with the web as well, but I don't have much experience. I am looking to flip a duplex that I am bidding on and would like to use the web to sell it.
Is there any courses/books/websites that I can use to learn quickly how to sell a house on the web? What about using it to find other properties to flip?
Download a trial version of Adobe Dreamweaver and see if you like doing the design yourself. If not several bigger domain companies (go daddy for example) have easy to use software to build your website. Adobe has several tutorials that will get you a basic website up and running. I plan to buy a template online and edit for my stuff.
wa_re_2008 - get a domain name and hosting account at http://www.bluehost.com. Use their simplescripts program to automatically install any type of website you want. dig in, tweak to your heart's content! Feel free to hit me with questions if you like :)
Hal Cranmer - awesome reason to start a site...however if you don't have a lot of knowledge on building sites, and your main goal is simply to sell a single property, get on FSBO sites and list it everywhere for free. no reason to make it more complicated than it needs to be!
wordpress, blogger and other free services are great, easy ways to get started. I highly recommend either hiring someone or taking on the learning curve and building a professional site on your own domain if you want to do it long term or for professional reasons.
Weebly is nice. Wordpress is excellent as well, but overall, it depends on what your needs are exactly. If you are soley advertising yourself as an investor/agent, than a wordpress blog may be sufficient as it creates more of a "profile" for yourself.
If you are selling just a single house, than I don't really see a webpage as necessary. There are so many places to post it up online in addition to social marketing, you can easily get the home sold without working an completely new website for it, not to say it would not help.
If you plan to go "corporate" by listing products online, services, links, pictures/etc and dive into the internet marketing world, you may want to go for a more professional approach. I agree with Christian, you may need to hire someone or just dive into learning ropes.
Send me an email and if I am on a good mood (haha) I will setup your WP blog for you on my hosting account - if I am too busy I can probably still help out as I can get my staff to help for a small fee.
I'd say hire someone to do a fully functional site for leads and buyers. If not you can use wordpress but consider the time you'll be spending doing it.
A good URL from GoDaddy and Ning.com, as easy as it gets. Plus Ning now has tons of great social media plug ins. Wordpress.org also works well but can be a little more complex at times. Even large coprs are now using Ning for campaign ads.
So do you design the website first? (I'm using Homestead) and then host your domain? (I'm using GoDaddy)
Or do I have it backwards? I've already checked to see if the domain is available. I still need to register it.
Set up hosting (usually comes with a domain), then build your site on the server. You can build prior and just upload also. Just depends on how you like to work. One word of caution...be careful checking for a domain and then coming back later to buy it. Often, if you've checked availability a couple times it will be gone...a taster will have nabbed it.
If you need any help getting things up and running I'm happy to help.