Alex Tew was like any other college student with a low bank account, student loans waiting to burden him after graduation and dreams of making millions of dollars. Except there was one difference: He made the million. Tew was an undergraduate determined to avoid a life of debt after college, so after nights of brainstorming ways to make cash quick, he came up with the Web site known as www.milliondollarhomepage.com.

The idea was simple: Make one million pixels of advertising space available to sell for $1 each. He not only managed to make $1 million in five months, but he later became known as an Internet phenomena.

Similar to Tew’s story, Mark Zuckerberg was an undergraduate with a small idea that he brought online, and he ended up making millions as founder and CEO of Facebook.

Because the economic downturn has made traditional ways of making money in the current business realm have become scarcer, young entrepreneurs may see creating an online startup business as an attractive option to making a living. Especially with an Internet-savvy generation, creative ideas such as Tew’s Web site may be more feasible than attempting to break the barrier to enter the corporate world.

Because most popular technologies are free and little capital is needed to get an idea launched, there is a drastic increase in competition for online businesses, Harjeet Taggar, co-creator of the online auction management company Auctomatic said. Harjeet and his cousin Kulveer Taggar were Oxford University undergraduates when they launched their Auctomatic business online, and less than a year after the launch, they sold their business to Canadian web firm Live Current Media for 2.5 million pounds, according to www.timesonline.co.uk.

Naturally, there is a division of what makes a successful business compared to mainstream Internet clutter that receives little to no visitor “traffic.” To break through the clutter, there are important introductory steps when transitioning from the sketchbook to a fully functional online business.

“Get the first version of the product launched ASAP. Make it very simple and basic, just enough to get the job done and start getting real feedback. We launched our first version over a weekend and then continued to iterate on it. It’s OK to feel like the site isn’t quite ready,” Taggar said.

For beginners entering the online market, the fastest and cheapest option to launch a startup business is through merchant storefront providers such as Yahoo! Stores, FreeMerchant or LiteCommerce, according to -. With these services, you are provided software tools, Web site templates, a shopping cart and more to use as a foundation to build on. As for students who have the desire to commit to the development of their online business idea, they can get ahead by talking to computer science students, hanging around the department to find people who are interested in the idea and have them help you build on the foundation, Taggar said.

Another area to consider when developing an online startup business is what value your Web site has to attract your customers, whether it is low prices, excellent services or your unique products, according to BusinessWeek.

“We put the emphasis and focus on the user experience above all else. Other services focused on having the maximum number of features and fancy things that just confused users. We wanted to make it really simple and user-friendly, which meant rethinking everything that had already been done,” Taggar said about his business. There are endless opportunities when developing ideas for an online business, and luckily, the financial consequences for business trial and error are relatively low. And considering this tech-savvy generation and familiarity with the Internet, this might be the time to take advantage of what the online business realm has to offer.