How to build a website
Building a website involves a lot of analysis. Today, it is a must for all corporate to have a web presence. But why Lets analyze from the stakeholders point of view. A website is necessary for a corporate, from its customers point of view. A prospective client would always want to know about a service providers products and services, and his existing client base. And what is a better place to get such relevant information from, other than the companys own website Again, a website is relevant for a company from the human resource point of view. A prospective employee would always want to know about the company and its vision, its services and corporate values from the companys website. And a technically correct website for a company comprises all relevant information such as: Information about the inception of a company, its mission & vision, services overview, contact information and other such relevant issues.
But, be it for corporate or for an individual, how are websites built
The first step towards building a website is to identify the scope of work that exists there. One has to identify what features will be there in the website that would add value to the website, and will attract viewer. Research has shown that an online reader has a concentration level of 20 seconds, per website. He will stay back, only if he is able to find desirable and relevant information within 20 seconds in a website. If not, he moves away by a single click of the mouse. So first and foremost, it has to be ensured that a users interest is retained on to a website through attractive and relevant content and design.
Plan the website content first
Planning the Site Content is the primary phase of creating a successful website. Planning of the content involves finding the correct keywords and choosing a well thought out concept for you. You can make your concept profitable by analyzing and the competition. As mentioned earlier, the first step to this is defining the scope of work and carving out a strong website feature list or website structure that is optimal from the point of view of both human visitors and search engine spiders.
Create a website that will pull traffic and rank high in the search engines
People often start creating a website without knowing what they want the site to achieve. Its important to do the brain storming right at the beginning. Plan your site content well, in order to determine your success. Do it right the first time. Because it costs both time and money to go back and fix problems once the site development is already done.
Whats a website, if it cannot be found in the search engines Keep this in mind, and create keywords. The goal of creating keywords is to identify the words with which users would most often search in the various search engines like Google, Yahoo etc, to access the kind of content that your website has to offer.
Web Design: clean and attractive
Assess a website from the point of view of your target audience. Who are they What information are they trying to seek Is your website equipped well to solve their problem What are the probable keywords which they would use to search for the relevant information Try to answer these questions and your website is bound be a niche.
Your Web design is a reflection of your business, your organizations character and the quality of your product. Web surfers not only want the right info, they also want to see a simple, clean, well structured yet attractive design. An effective web design includes informative content, simple layout, easy navigation and fast loading graphics. A well designed website allows users to search for and locate the information that they seek in the quickest and most convenient manner possible.
While designing a website, keep the following in mind:
Browsers Compatibility: A professionally designed website must be browser compatible. You must keep in mind, that your site in various web browsers like internet explorer, Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, Firefox etc. A good website design must make provision for this.
Loading time: Web designers often face a problem of slow loading time, which annoys users and they leave the search to go to another website. Design in such a way that loading is quick. Make graphic sizes low to facilitate fast download.
Internet users are impatient generally, and if your site is slow, they know they can hop to another site immediately.
Consistency: A website with different colored background for every page looks more unprofessional. A well designed website must have similar backgrounds, colors, fonts, and navigation buttons etc; all uniform.
Navigation: All your hard development work will be worthless if your site isn't easily navigable even if you have the best Web site design or highly informative content.
Font style, color and Size: It is essential to maintain the whole website in the same font style, same size and a common color. Ideally the most suitable fonts to be used on the web are Ariel, Verdana or Times New Roman. An optimum font size to be used is 10 and color is black.
Domain Names and Web Hosting: Selecting a domain name is the first and most important step in the entire process of website building. Select an appropriate name for your website that relates to your business (www.yourcompanyname.com) and look up for parties who would help host your website. For hosting your site, you need to book server space (25 MB or 50MB) depending on the content of your size. A simple website (with no database or dynamic features) calls for 25 MB of server space. So after you book your domain name and server space, you can upload your website by using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) software, which is simple and easy to use.
So a website building is not simple. It requires you to go through a few necessary steps, and if you miss any of these, your website has a chance to bust in the cyber crowd. So be careful, build up strong content and use these tips for building an effective website.
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