I bought a stand up desk a half year ago for ergonomics. I was fed up with sitting (for many of the reasons that Mark Sisson recently wrote about) so I hired a handyman (through the online classifieds) to build me a standup workstation. It was pretty expensive ($450), but it’s top quality and I plan to use it extensively for many years to come. It’s gigantic: 3′ deep and 5′ wide, giving me plenty of room to do both computer work and paperwork. It’s height adjustable within a few inches for fine tuning (via a screw mechanism between the legs and the tabletop).

I find that standing is nice but as Mark pointed out, static standing has its drawbacks. But since you’re not locked in a chair, it’s easy to move around or stretch once in a while—I like to drop into a grok squat once in a while. Foot soreness can be extreme at the beginning if you’re unaccustomed to standing for long periods. But your feet will adapt in a week or two, and will become even better adapted over longer periods. I use an anti-fatigue mat, the kind that cashiers and other workers sometimes use. It makes the transition much easier and is really nice to stand on. Good posture is really important to avoid back soreness—just stand as tall as you can (like you do when you’re getting your height measured). It also helps to have a tall stool to sit down once in a while so you’re not always in one static position.

Stand up workstation

My workstation also features dual monitors (24″ and 19″), which is a big productivity booster. I keep them below eye level and angle them upwards to reduce eyestrain—when you look down, your eyelids close more and your eyes don’t get as dry.

I also use the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 which I can’t recommend highly enough. The split keyboard keeps your wrists in natural alignment and the front is raised, creating a slight negative angle which also does wonders for the wrists. I can’t stand regular keyboards anymore, it feels like typing handcuffed. I can type much faster and much more comfortably on my ergonomic keyboard.

Rather than using wussy computer speakers, I hooked up my 500W 5.1 surround sound system. I can only send it a stereo signal, but it’s still awesome.

I recommend a standing workstation if you put in a lot of time at your desk. Otherwise, you might want to try some of the cheap alternatives that Mark suggests.

Vibram FiveFingers

Vibram FiveFingers "Sport" model

The Vibram FiveFingers are the shoe or sandal equivalent of toe socks. Designed to give you the barefoot experience with the benefits of underfoot protection, they’ll make your feet come alive! There’s nothing better except actually going barefoot. They’re great for outdoor or fitness activities. I like to use them for doing sprints on the grass at the park. You can immediately run faster because the power of your toes and feet are fully unleashed and because your running mechanics improve (no more heel strikes). They also make amazing sandals or watershoes as they’re incredibly grippy (the soles have sipes cut into them, just like snow tires). Very fun to wear!

As Tim Ferriss explains, traditional shoes can be quite harmful to foot health and posture, while barefooting in FiveFingers can bring amazing relief. In his case, it eliminated 10 years of lower-back pain in 2 weeks. Primal living blogger Mark Sisson is also a big fan of the FiveFingers as primal footwear and likes to use them for playing ultimate and doing beach sprints.

Order them online from the Vibram website but be sure to measure carefully as accurate sizing is very important. Canadians can get them from Mountain Equipment Co-op for an even lower price!

Unfortunately, you can’t wear them all the time, either because of cold weather or public reasons like your job. And that’s where the Wysong Ergonomic Insoles come in handy, providing barefoot benefits all in the privacy of your normal shoes.

Wysong Ergonomic Insoles

Wysong Ergonomic Insoles

The Wysong Ergonomic Insoles are designed to emulate the natural foot support of walking in sand. The heel of the insole is missing so that your heel “floats”, relieving the pressure on it. This promotes proper posture and discourages heel strikes in your step. The toes are also cut out to create “toe-grips” which actually makes a big impact by engaging your toes for even more propulsion.

They’re the perfect solution for day-to-day use, where going barefoot or wearing FiveFingers wouldn’t be feasible. They take some getting used to and adjustment to find the right position, but they definitely put out results. Not only are they super-comfortable to wear for standing and walking, they also unleash the power of your feet in athletic activity. You can immediately feel the difference while running or jumping, a feeling of power and swiftness. You’ll feel a new bounce in your step and an urge to go bounding away! Best of all, you can put them in any shoe you want, so you can wear them all the time. I’ve been wearing the Wysong Ergonomic Insoles for almost four years and can honestly say they’re the best health product I’ve ever come across.

Available online from the Wysong website.

Verdict

I was extremely impressed with both of these products and highly recommend them—for health, comfort and athletics. Both are definitely worth a try and are affordable enough to warrant it.

I’ll update the list as needed to keep it current. That way, it won’t get old and out of date. Leave your comments and suggestions on this post (comments disabled on the article).

Check it out: The Best Free Software

Even in this age of user-friendliness and online how-to guides, it can still be a bit overwhelming to set up your first website. It can be daunting just shopping for hosting, where you’re bombarded with all sorts of foreign terminology (eg. cPanel, mySQL, FTP, etc.) Admittedly, there is a fairly steep learning curve. But with the right guide, you can easily get a website set up and start publishing your content right away. Here are the four steps to set up a website:

1. Register a domain name: The first thing to do is claim your name. Domain name registration costs around $10/year. It doesn’t really matter where you register, so just find the best price. I recommend Moniker based on their great prices ($8/year for .com).
2. Find a web host: You’ll want to make sure you find a good host. Hosting is very important and is your main expense. I recommend HostGator—they’re a solid company and their hosting has all the features you’ll need at great prices for both single and unlimited domain accounts (in case you ever decide to create more websites). Once you have an account set up for your domain, move on to step 3.
3. Point the domain at your host: Your host will give you at least 2 nameserver addresses (e.g., ns1.hostname.com and ns2.hostname.com). Log in at your domain registrar and paste the nameservers from your host into the nameserver (DNS) records. This points your domain name to your host where your website will be. It can take as long as 72 hours for domain propagation, so don’t panic if your domain name doesn’t take you to your host right away.
4. Build your site: Now that the groundwork is complete, you can start building your site. To begin, briefly familiarize yourself with the basics of cPanel (the video tutorials and help pages are excellent). There are a lot of things to play with, but you really might only use a handful: Softaculous/Fantastico, File Manager, Backups, FTP accounts, and MX records (for using Google Apps). When you’re ready to create the actual public website, open an installer such as Softaculous or Fantastico. If you want a blog or a content site, go with WordPress; for forums, try phpBB. (You can even test drive applications to get a feel for them.) By using an application, you’ll never have to write any HTML source code! Fill out the required information and let Fantastico work it’s magic. That’s it: your site is now live. Log in to the application and start creating your content.

With these four simple steps, you can create a website within hours. From here on out, the going is much easier. Popular applications like WordPress are very easy to use and learn, with a wealth of documentation to help you with anything you can’t figure out on your own. By using themes and plugins, you can create an amazing website—customized to your preferences—with minimal effort and without any experience (or extra costs)!

Publishing your ideas on the web is easy, cheap and rewarding. There are still countless opportunities on the web—for profit, fame or disseminating information. I often have trouble finding information on the web and find myself thinking, “here’s a niche website opportunity.” And as you know, the web evolves at a breakneck pace—who knows what new opportunities will open up? More and more people are using the internet each year. Better to be ahead of the game than to be a latecomer and miss out. If you can’t justify spending any money yet, check out Blogger or WordPress.com to start a free blog—you even buy a domain and have them host it for a small fee. There are no good excuses not to own a website. So get started right now—I could use some help challenging the mass delusions of our time!

Updated: Feb 17, 2010

The Hype

There’s a lot of hype about SBI on the internet. A Google search turns up an avalanche of positive reviews, mostly from affiliates. It’s hard to even find a negative review! Add to this that other non-affiliates say good things about it. Even blogging king Steve Pavlina strongly recommends it (and probably makes a fortune doing so).

I think the affiliates generate most of the hype—there are swarms of them out there. SiteSell relies 100% on affiliate marketing for its sales. The affiliate program offers a $75 commission per referral, lifetime renewal commissions and 2 tier income. This motivates lot of people to become affiliates and push SBI as a miracle product for creating content-based income websites. All these sales websites effectively drown out any negative reviews in the search engine results.

After my experience with SBI, I was shocked that there weren’t more negative reviews out there. This motivated me to make my own contribution.

A rare negative review

I don’t think SBI is a scam, but it’s not for everyone. The actual value in SBI is the education, not the technology. It could be useful for someone who doesn’t know much about computers or the web. But for someone capable of installing software like WordPress at their own host (which is really easy), SBI would be more of a hindrance than a help.

Here’s my point-by-point review:

Appearance

I’m not sure if it’s a conscious effort on their part, but everything from SBI looks like it’s from the infancy of the web. The main SiteSell website sports a design that I would date back to the late ’90s. The administrator interface is the worst—it looks ancient (early ’90s) and it’s terribly ugly. Fortunately, these are unimportant cosmetic issues that have no bearing on the success of your website. Unfortunately, the SBI themes are no better. Unless you can make or find your own HTML/CSS design and add in the special SBI tags, you’re stuck with choosing from less than a dozen really lame and outdated themes (mid ’90s). This is a big problem, because first impressions are so important on the web.

My rating: 3/25

Educational resources

SBI’s strength is in education. Someone who knows nothing about creating and marketing a website may find their Action Guide handy. Then again, with a bit of patience you could find all the information you need for free online (in fact, the Action Guide is free). SBI just boils it down and explains it in simple terms so you don’t have to do the research. The weekly email newsletter contains informative articles and links to good forum threads. The forums have a great reputation: there is a very helpful and supportive online community. You can even get free forum access (read-only) by signing up for the affiliate program. Yet I can’t fully endorse the educational resources: they’re often simplistic and fluffy, aimed at very novice webmasters. Personally, I would just do my own research at a few different sources. So, while there is some value in the educational resources, you can access them for free or do the research yourself.

My rating: 18/25

Technology

For market research, SBI has a useful brainstorming tool for doing keyword analysis. It uses Wordtracker‘s keyword research service (SBI users get 25 queries per year). If keyword research is important to you, you could just use Wordtracker’s free trial or subscribe for one month. Or try a free alternative like Keyword Discovery.

The built-in blogging functionality is downright awful, but you can get around it by installing whatever blogging software you want on a subdomain (eg. blog.domain.com). However, there’s a catch: SBI won’t host it, so you have to buy separate hosting.

There are some handy tools like a Google Sitemap generator and automatic search engine pinging, but these features are free (and better) with software like WordPress or Joomla.

The control panel (Site Central) is pretty basic, without many features. It does make things simple, but it’s terribly limiting for more advanced users. File management is also pretty cumbersome—you can’t create any directories, so all of your pages have to sit in the root folder. I would avoid SBI due to these constraints alone.

My rating: 8/25

Price

In my opinion, SBI is outrageously priced at $300 per website per year. And if you want a blog or forum, you have to pay for 3rd party hosting on top of that. In comparison, domains only cost $8 per year. Hosting for a single domain costs $60 per year, or $100 for unlimited domains. Throw in a free software tool like WordPress and you have a way better setup for a fraction of the cost.

My rating: 1/25

Summary

If you find yourself lured by the sales talk, don’t bite. The SBI features and tools may sound impressive, but you have to compare them to the alternatives. I’ve found free alternatives that are much better than SBI’s offerings. The only thing of value that they offer is education, but they put that out for free. There’s no reason to buy the product. If you’re still undeterred, at least try WordPress so you can compare them and see the difference.

With a score of 30%, SBI gets a big red FAIL:

Appearance: 3/25
Education: 18/25
Technology: 8/25
Price: 1/25

Total: 30/100

A better way: Open source over proprietary technology

Being disappointed with SBI, I tried out some free open-source content management systems (CMS). The top three are Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. Joomla was pretty good, but I found it a bit hard to learn and too bulky for my needs. I haven’t tried Drupal yet; it’s the most fully featured, but the hardest to learn. WordPress was just perfect—easy to install, very intuitive, and a great selection of themes and plugins to make it do just about anything. I was very impressed—WordPress blows SBI out of the water!

Open source is better—Firefox is one of the best examples. In addition to the CMSes I mentioned above, there are plenty of high-quality open-source web applications, such as phpBB, MediaWiki, Movable Type, etc. If you’re worried about support, the free forum support usually suffices. If that’s not good enough, you can hire someone from Elance. Open source software is constantly being improved and bugs are fixed almost immediately. Best of all, you don’t pay a cent. It’s simply a smart idea to use flexible open-source technology as opposed to restrictive proprietary technology.

Final verdict

If you’re computer or web illiterate, your best bet is to skip SBI and hire someone to make a website for you. If you have the skills (or the potential to learn the skills) to set up WordPress or another CMS at your own host, then do it. It’s easier than ever to set up a great looking website for under $75/year. In this age of free software and cheap hosting, I foresee a dark future for SBI.

My experience with SBI was one big letdown. I transferred my domain out well before my subscription expired. I strongly discourage using Site Build It, no matter how good the affiliates make it sound. SBI is so bad, you couldn’t even pay me to use it!

Further reading

• WordPress Vs SiteBuildIt for Making Money Online
  
• SBI (Site Build It) versus WordPress: How to Structure a Website
  
• Site Build it – Don’t Buy It
• Site Build It Review Bazooka
• The Great Site Build It SCAM
• Site Build It Review Site

Update (March 25, 2009): there has been an explosion of negative reviews of SBI after Lis Sowerbutts’ negative review triggered a massive comment war which saw Ken Evoy and his minions battling Lis and her internet marketing friends. I’ve added a few of the new links to the ‘Further reading’ section above.