Your free essential toolkit for your membership site – part 1

Now it’s obvious you have a computer and internet connection otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to make it to this web page. So you have the basics of what’s needed to get your site up and running.

Okay what’s next, well you are going to create documents, graphics, videos e-book and so on in support of your enterprise so how do you do it. With FREE software of course.

Top of the list is probably going to be a program to create documents, yes you do have a text editor of some form that was supplied with your machine but at the point you want to become more adventurous and add images or hyperlinks you have just gone past the plain text editor’s barrier of capability.So what are the alternatives out there? Well to be honest I use OpenOffice products and find that the excellent WRITER word processor has the edge over Microsoft products in a couple of ways if your use is to predominantly produce material for the internet.

First of all the ability to create a standards compliant PDF document directly from the program is great, no need to install extensions or file convertors.

Secondly in my opinion it has better support for internal document and external internet hyperlinks and so on that make it much easier to create interactive PDF documents and e-books. And in addition to this the program is fully compatible with Microsoft Office file formats so you can produce transferrable document with ease.

The other package you will make use of is the presentation package IMPRESS also part of the OpenOffice suite, a fully featured presentation program to help you communicate your message in the form of slide shows, handouts and presentations. Insert text and images freely with this program and using the template based presentations maintain your formatting and style.

You can use IMPRESS as a very effective backdrop for your video presentation series, matching word and image transitions with your commentary.

Talking of images the creation of logos, manipulating photographs and creating images is fundamental to the medium of the internet, a medium that is rich in imagery and colour.

Don’t think Photoshop think GIMP. Sounds like a wimpish product you may think but I can assure you that there is almost no image creation or manipulation technique that you can’t achieve with GIMP. I have used it exclusively now for years and nothing comes near it in terms of flexibility and capability. It does have a learning curve but when you have the basics under your belt you will be flying.

Now one word of advice here, you can get these programs in portable application versions at portableapps.com which means that you can carry them about with you on your USB memory stick and do your work anywhere there is a pc with a USB port.

Right let’s get back on track. So I have covered words, charts and images what’s next. Well how about a means of recording videos to put online.

Now there are two things to consider here, do you want to record a commentary overlaid on a screen capture and recording of some activity on your computer screen, well here I can propose something that is easy to use, CamStudio. CamStudio will enable you to produce AVI or flash files for you to load onto your site with absolute ease.

On the other hand if you wish to stand in front of a camera and present your information, well in that case you will need a decent webcam or camcorder to capture you material. Whilst decent webcams or camcorders are certainly not free, if you want to edit the files they output then there are a couple of choices you can go for.

I predominantly use VirtualDub to do simple file editing, VirtualDub may display a quirky interface but is very effective, particularly if you utilise one of the many plug in filters.

There is also Handbrake, which has a bit of a friendlier user interface but with similar features and good file format conversion options.

So there you have it, a whole suite of software to fulfil all of your needs that will cost you absolutely NOTHING, not a bad deal hey?