How to Make a Website Without the Headache

Before you bang your head on the keyboard, let's run through a couple of quick tips on how to make a website. Making a website doesn't have to be hard, but when you're just learning how to make a website it can be frustrating.

The first step is very important: Planning. You should never skip this stage. The reason is simple, the web is full of competition. If you don't look at how many other other websites are in your planned niche, you won't know what to expect. For example, if you find out that there are 300 million other websites in the "bowling" niche and only 1 million in "fishing", which one has the most competition?

Okay, that was a trick question. You need one other piece of information. Search volume. This is how many searches are preformed for your given niche. Let's expand the example above as we continue down the road of how to make a website. If there are 100 million searches each month for "bowling" and only 10,000 for fishing (note: these are only example figures) we can calculate which one has a better ratio.

Divide the number of websites by the number of searches and you'll have your ratio. For "bowling" there are 3 sites for ever searcher. And for the "fishing" niche there are 100 sites for every searcher. Which one has more competition? The answer is "fishing". Even though there are fewer sites out there there is also less search volume.

This is the fundamental step in learning how to make a website. And one you should put it into practice no matter if you're building your first website or your 30th. Investing a little time in the beginning can literally make or break your efforts making a website.

The next step also directly follows your initial research. Registering a domain name. Why? Because you will be using the information you collected when you pick your domain name. While you may think that this is only logical, 99% of the people making websites don't realize how important this is. By ensuring that you get a domain with your desired keyword in it, your site becomes more targeted. Thus you immediately raise your chances to rank for that keyword.

You see, one of the things that search engines base their results on is the relevance between the website URL and content on the page. The more relevance you have, the better chance you have to rank.

Learning how to make a website is more about learning how to avoid the little mistakes that can have a major impact on your website. Ready to take your knowledge even further? Click here to read more of my articles on how to make a website.

Optimizing Your Web Site to Make Money Online

In order to make money online you want to optimize your web site. What does this mean and how do you accomplish that?

First of all you need to appreciate that there is no one optimum web site. What makes an optimum web site depends on your point of view. A web site a designer may feel is optimum a user may feel is awkward and difficult to navigate. Even two designers may not agree because of personal likes and dislikes of designs and functionality.

So let's accept the fact that there is no one optimum web site to make money online, and look at the approach you need to take and the elements you need to include or not include when designing or having your web site designed in order for it to approach optimum.

1. Don't be afraid of white backgrounds. The most effective web designs use white backgrounds and very clean lines so as not to distract the reader from the sales message of your site.

2. Do not overdo pictures and images. Use them sparingly. Pictures and images can spice up a site, but when overdone they slow down the load of your site to the reader's computer and are annoying. After you have your site designed, check out the loading time, to make sure it loads reasonably rapidly. If not, cut out a picture or two and recheck it, until you are satisfied that it is not too slow. By the way, if possible do this check on a small less powerful computer. Not everyone has a computer like yours.

3. Make navigation of your site simple and straight forward so your reader will find the content he is looking for easily. You must remember that all users are not computer savvy, so the easier your site is to navigate the better.

4. This really relates to navigation, but make sure your site is built on rudimentary rules of web design like having clear buttons, describing links accurately and displaying links in the conventional blue. This will make sure that users have the least amount of trouble accessing different pages of your site.

An optimum web site brings together a classy look with easy navigation. When a user open up your site, their first impression should be "Wow! What a great site. And then when they start to work their way around your site, they should find it easy to navigate to find what they are looking for.

These elements are the technical aspects of your web site. When you have these covered, you must make sure that your content of your site is of top notch quality. It has to be well written and without grammatical or spelling errors. It is a question of balance. You want to spell out your complete sales pitch, but you want to be concise and not overdo it. So keep in mind that for you to be successful and make money online you need balance. It's the secret of life.

Follow these simple ideas and your web site will come as close to optimum as possible and help you achieve your goals in your goals to make money online.

Don McCobb is a retired international oil executive and CPA currently promoting Money Making Online Ideas. His blog, http://marketingourvisions.com, is full of interesting ideas on internet marketing and other stuff. His website is http://www.workingforourfuture.com.