A couple of good things that have happened in the last week that I thought worth sharing with you, especially if you are wanting to start a website but feel you don’t have the design or technical skills to do so.

The company that hosts my websites, Totalchoicehosting, allow you to manage them via a control panel called cPanel. Most other hosts do likewise and it’s an easy and intuitive way to add an email account, check your website visitor statistics and so on.

But last week they added Fantastico to every cPanel and for website developers this opens up a whole new world of opportunity.

You see, there are some superb content management tools available today that are free to use and allow users to build fantastic websites without having to know much at all about coding and all that other goobleygook that scares people away.

The biggest hurdle to using these scripts was always downloading and installing them in the first place. Not that some aren’t VERY easy to install. But the fear factor and a little techno mumbo jumbo is often all it takes for people to look on in wonder and then walk away.

Enter Fantastico. It autoinstalls dozens of these scripts for you! No more tears! And a giant step forward for technophobe webmasters. Typo3, Wordpress, Drupal and more can now be installed automatically and ready to use for you. And that’s just the content management systems. Want to offer live support to your website visitors? Then why not have Help Center Live automatically installed on your website? Want to add a shopping cart? There are three to choose from.

There’s a world of opportunity out there and real potential for you to make money online. And there’s no doubt that Fantastico has brought that world within the reach of countless more people.

The other thing I wanted to tell you about is Textpattern. I only came across it thanks to an April Fool’s joke that claimed Wordpress were merging with Textpattern to form Wordpattern. They aren’t joining forces, but as jokes go it was a clever marketing move. Wordpress users will now check out Textpattern and vice versa.

I’d never heard of Textpattern before, but after visiting the website it looks like something that I could definitely use on some of my projects. It doesn’t appear in Fantastico (yet), but I’ve downloaded it and will give it a spin when I have more time. I will let you know how I get on.