Thursday, January 29, 2009

It is Not So Hard to Build Your First Website

You may think building a website is a complicated process, but it really is not. There are many guides to help you design and get your website up and running. Once you have it all set up and get a look at your new website, you will be surprised at how much you have learned. Just follow a few basic steps outlined here and you will be the proud owner of a website shortly.

The First Steps

The first thing you should do is decide how you want your website to look. Naturally you will want to pick a theme that is relevant to the service or product you are selling. The features it contains will be another thing you will need to think about and it will help to write this down. Use the following to help you figure out the features.

1) The way your website is laid out is very important. It needs to be easy to navigate which will encourage traffic rather than cause them to click out of your site as fast as they can. If you need help with this there are very good programs online that will show you what the options are for setting up your site. They will explain how to insert text and clipart as well as putting in your information via a text editor or visual editor.

2) What keywords will you use? Think about what you would use if you were searching for your product. There are all types of variations of keywords that may be relevant to your site. Even a misspelled word can be a keyword. People often misspell words and if it will lead them to your site, well that is great.

3) What will the text contain? This is important to explain to prospective customers what you are selling and what they are to expect. If you have memberships available this needs to be explained. Everything pertaining to your site needs to be discussed here so people will know what to expect.

Once you have decided on these aspects, you will be ready to start setting up the website. A web hosting company will have to be chosen to host your site once it is set up. There are many that have good rates. The free ones are not as popular as some of the others because they often have advertisements which consistently promote their web hosting.

Make sure you choose the right size space for your website when it comes to web hosting. The disk space available to you from the web hosting site has to be enough to accommodate your site. Do they have a monthly traffic requirement?

You will have to choose a domain name if you have not already chosen one. Checking on it and making sure it does not belong to someone else is very important. There are online resources for doing this. The domain names are renewable every year for a small fee. You can also get a domain name through most web hosting companies.

Setting up your pages will be easy. Most hosting companies have a tutorial to guide you through the process. The rest is easy. All you have to do is publish your website for it to go live. Many hosting sites have a traffic generator for a very small fee which will get your site out to all the major search engines. Now just wait for the traffic to start flowing to your website.

Scott Simmonds has been building websites for several years.

For more information on web technology visit Scotts's website.

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