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Things to Consider when Creating a Website

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Decisions, decisions!

It’s not always about what’s best, since “best” is open to personal opinion. What you need to decide is what best fits your needs for your particular project. Are you wanting to write all of your web pages from scratch with a plain text editor, or would you prefer to use a program designed for building sites? What do you need from your web host? Do you expect a high-volume site or low to moderate volume? Here we will take a look at some of the choices available to you. Since there are many come-and-go companies out there, we’ve included services and products only companies we know to be stable and reliable.

Web hosts

Where your site is hosted is one of the most important decisions you will make. No matter how good the content or how jazzy the design, it all rests on the servers that host you. We’ve compiled a shortlist of some of the most popular hosts out there to help you get around the fly-by-nights.

HTML or WYSIWYG

Don’t think that using a design program somehow makes you “untrue to the art” of web design. The truth is that the vast majority of professional designers use some sort of program to do basic HTML layout. A design program lets you design your layout as the end-user will see and transforms it to HTML for you.

 

Building your Web Site

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It’s finally time to start getting your hands dirty.

Build your basic page layout and navigation based on your design from earlier. Leave the content areas blank until you have gotten the layout just how you want it.

It’s a good idea to save this page as your template. Just give it a name such as “template” and hold onto it. For each new page needed you can open your template and simply choose “save as” with the new page name. This will keep your design consistent from one page to the next.

Now start writing your pages. When you feel yourself becoming bored or distracted, take a break. Never try to finish in a day more than you can stay excited about or your content will suffer. Better to take a few extra days and have a finished product you can truly be proud of.

When saving your pages, remember that they can be called anything you like except for the first page which should be named index. The server knows which page is to be displayed first by it’s name.

Once all your pages are saved your ready to upload them to the server. If you used a host that provides a builder such as iPage, you can simply choose “publish” and the program will do the rest. If you used a WYSIWYG program such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver, follow the instructions provided with the program. If you wrote the pages freehand or using a program that offers no built in uploading feature, you will need to get an ftp (file transfer protocol) program. You can find them cheap or free with a search in Google. Your ftp address will be ftp.your-domain.com.

 

Mapping out Blog Content Ideas

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It’s now time to decide how your site will be put together.

On paper, write down all of the main topic headlines. Under those, write in what sections of content should go under each headline and in what order. While doing this, imagine the site in your mind. Think of the visitor’s experience. Feel free to move content around until you feel it is all exactly where it needs to go. This is how your navigation will be structured.