The process of creating a website

Do you have ideas for a good website but don’t know where to start about getting one? Then this website can help you get started. What are the steps involved in getting a new website?

Plan your site

It’s a good idea to first have a good idea about what you want to communicate on your website and how you want to display it. Think about what your marketing strategy is and find out who your customers and their characteristics. If you have a clear idea about what you want to communicate, try making a website structure. Just draw on a piece of paper and start with the home page. What are your main links from there? And sublinks? What kind of functionality do you want in the site? Do you want animation, search, discussion board? Who will update the site? Will it be you or your web master? Also think about the kind of design you want. Perhaps you like a particular colour scheme. Have a look at other websites and find a few that you really like. These will give you and your designer a clear idea what your style is.

Register a domain name

You can already register a domain name. Please make sure that you register your domain name with an accredited domain register and check prices with several providers as prices can vary a lot. You can also do this later and let your web designer/developer do it (if you decide to have one) but please store your login information somewhere so your designer can access your domain.

Hosting

You will also need to get your website hosted so that it is visible on the Internet. However, if you don’t know exactly which technology you are going to use it may be better to talk to your web designer first. They can advise on the best options for your business. They often offer hosting as well and can manage it for you. In this way you only have to deal with one company on all website matters.

Options for creating your site

1. Starting a website from scratch using a web editor or plain coding; very cheap and no special software needed but quite a big learning curve.
2. Using a website builder; A quick and affordable option for getting a website. Although this is a quick way to make a website if you have a good eye for structure and design, the websites don’t always look that good. Customers usually only respond well to well-designed professionally looking websites.
3. Start with a template bought from the internet; this is a good option if you can work with programs like Dreamweaver and Photoshop. You will need to know how to optimize your site though and will need a good eye for structure and design.
4. Use an open source application like WordPress or Joomla; some of these applications are easy to use and combining them with a template you can have a good quality website quite quickly.  Setting up will need some technical knowlegde, but once these sites are up and running you can easily update them yourself.  You can  ask your web designer to set this up for you and then manage the site yourself.
5. Build a website from scratch by using one of these program languages (please note that many of these have a high learning curve, so this is not a good option if you want a website quickly): HTML is the easiest to learn, and if you’re up to it, you’ll be able to tweak your web design any way you want, and you won’t have to pay anybody else to update or change your site. You can also use a html editor like Adobe Dreamweaver that will allow you to build a site without having to learn any code. XHTML is the new web language set by W3C’s standards. Almost identical to HTML, it follows a stricter set of rules for marking up information – what this means, for the most part, is minor changes to the way you write code. CSS, which stands for “Cascading Style Sheets”, gives more flexibility for styling the HTML. A browser sided scripting language, such as JavaScript, allows you to make your page interactive. Aserver sided scripting language (PHP, ASP with JavaScript or VB Script or Python) can be used to make things on your site move and edit or create forums. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a technique of using a browser sided language and a server sided language to make the page get new information from the server without refreshing the page, greatly reducing bandwidth usage and vastly improving the user’s experience. Think of the possibilities: you could probably make a web based instant messaging service!
6. The final option is to hire a professional web designer. They can take care of everything for you. They should be able to advise you on what is best for your business and choose the appropriate technology for you. Many of the will also able to advise and help you with the promotion of your website.

Upload your website

Once your website has been created and approved it can be uploaded to the Internet for testing.

Test your website

Different browsers display your site differently. So check that your website looks good in different browsers and on different computers.

Promote and publicize your site

Not only is it important that your web site is created exactly for the purpose and audience that you had in mind, your web site also needs to be found and seen! There are now millions of websites on the net so this is very important if you want your website to be a success.

Some of the options are:

• Registering your site to search engines
• Optimizing pages with keywords to ensure top ranking in search engines
• Finding relevant sites which could link to your site
• Creating an online newsletter
• Using social networks to promote your site
• Online pay per click ads
• Banner advertising on appropriate sites
• Analyzing website statistics to see where you can make improvements
• Using newsgroups
• Using affiliate programs to attract visitors to your site
• Registration of multiple domain names
• Keep your website current and give visitors a reason to come back