Working With What You Have!

I got an email from someone that wanted to exchange services with me. They wanted to provide me with a "bigger and better" website in exchange for me doing some grant research work for them. While "exchanging services" has always been recommended as a beneficial thing to do you should not do it all the time! Remember you're in business and you want to continue to be a business and you won't stay that way for long if you except an exchange of services in lieu of excepting payment for the service (or product) that you provide. If you have a talent or skill then you should not feel guilty about being (and wanting to be) paid for it.

With that being said I want you to take a look at the website that this person was talking about. It is my Grant Basics 101 page.

If you have ever thought of or wanted to have a webpage for your business then you should keep my page in mind. First off it is a page about the grant research that I provide. As you will notice the page has a LOT of information on it. Why? Because there are a lot of misconceptions and myths about the whole grant process and this page seeks to clear at least some of that up. On the page you will find information about the grant process in general, examples of grant programs and examples of people that have received grants - all the kind of general and basic information that one should know about the whole grant process. Now the page doesn't have a lot of pictures on it because the grant process is not pictures it is content, text, paperwork and research and people have to realize this if they want to go through the grant process and come out the other end with most of their sanity left intact. Research is work, work and more work and you are not going to get the information that you seek by just browsing a few pages. You are going to have to dig deeper if you want to find any grant programs that you may be eligible to apply for.

With that being said this same page serves another purpose and that purpose is that it is a webpage! It is a webpage that is seen. It is a webpage that ranks very high on the search engines and it will always be a "work in progress" webpage. But the main point is that it is a webpage that is up on the internet and viewed. Now if you want to have a business online then this is what you have to have - a webpage! If you don't have enough money to buy a domain name and webspace then use one of the free webpage websites - there are more than a few out there. I have even seen people with a business webpage on MySpace.com and that is a very popular website. If you don't know how to design a webpage then you can use one of the gazillion freely available templates that are all over the internet.

Instead of complaining about what you don't have, start working with what you DO have!