Building Your Web Site
By Vernon Sandel
In preparation for
building a web site, you should have accomplished the following:
-
Decided upon your products or
services.
-
Found keywords that describe your
products or services that have significant search frequency but with
limited competition.
-
Chosen a domain name that expresses
your products. or services and contains at least one of your keywords.
-
Decided upon design and marketing
objectives of your web site. These are the goals you want your web
site to accomplish.
It is important to put
a lot of thought into the above factors because they may be even more
important to your chance of success in an internet business than your
web site.
The web site will be
your business representation on the internet, and as such it must look
professional. As a minimum it must contain:
-
Your logo
-
Your key information or marketing
message
-
Your contact information and business
location
You may want to
collect information from your visitors such as email addresses for
marketing purposes. Spend some time making an outline of the message you
want to present. Whether you hire someone to build your web site or do
it yourself, you will be responsible for the content including product
pictures. descriptions, etc.
It would be helpful to
make a sketch of what you envision your home page should look like.
You can get ideas for
your web site by looking at competitive sites, seeing what content they
are using, what things they are doing. Be careful not to copy their
content or steal their pictures. Content can be rewritten in a manner
that makes the content yours. Do not use phrases or sentences directly
from their content or you may be contacted for copyright violation or
even sued.
Hiring a professional
to prepare a web site is costly, but may be worth the price. The
response you get from your site will depend upon how professional it
looks. When hiring a professional be sure to ask for a list of a number
of web sites that he has built to see if you like his style. Also look
at the placement of those sites on Google to see whether those sites
have been optimized for search engine traffic. A beautiful site without
traffic is worthless. Your web designer should have a good knowledge of
search engine optimization as well as artistic ability.
How much will a
professional web site cost? It depends of course on the size and
complexity, but you can expect to pay several hundred dollars for a
simple information site of a few pages to thousands of dollars for an
e-commerce site. If you get a price quote in the hundreds range it
probably is going to be a template site made up of off the shelf pieces
with very little customization.
IX Web Hosting and
An
Hosting, web hosting companies advertised on this site, both offer
totally custom web site design at very favorable prices to their hosting
customers. An Hosting does not advertise this on their web site, so
contact them to learn about what they have to offer. In addition,
Lunarpages has a program, LPQuicksite,
whereby a professional will design a template based web site for you
using your content and pictures for $12.95/month. Included in this
price is 30 minutes of a professional's time each month to update and
maintain your web site. This may be the easiest way to get a
quality web site for minimal cost if you are not artistically
inclined.
If you don’t have deep
pockets you can still make a very professional web site. Every hosting
company advertised on this site offers template based web building
software that allows you to build a web site without any programming
expertise. These programs reside on their servers and you build your web
site with components. The downside of these programs is you have to be
on the internet to use them and the components may not be unique to
your web site. Flexibility is limited, so if your ideas include unusual
features the programs may not work for you. Also, if the program is
proprietary you may not be able to move your web site to another host.
A free web
building software that has been getting rave reviews is
My Free Web
Builder. In addition to the software itself a text manual and a set of
videos can be downloaded to teach you how to use it. This program
resides on your computer and has about 100 templates, but you can also
build a custom web site without the templates. It does not require a
knowledge of html, the web building language. | 
