Articles

So You Want A Website...Where Do You Begin?

All Web Designers and Developers may do things a bit differently but the components of building a website stay the same. Whether you are building a website yourself or hiring a freelancer or company to do it for you, here is a basic list of what you will need to get started. You and/or your designer/developer will thank me later!

Website Planning Checklist & Worksheet

Download the worksheet, print it out and follow along below for clarification, and helpful advice.

What's First? You Need An idea! So What's Your Motive?

Why are you creating a web site? For your company/business? For your family or other personal reason? To share your expertise with the online world? To sell things? To make money? Whatever your reason, it's probably a good one and it deserves a great online presence. Make your site the best it can be...

1. Have a solid reason for creating a site.
2. Know your target audience. Who will be interested in your site?

What Type of Website Do You Need?

What is your maintenance plan? Who will be updating your site? Can you afford to pay someone? Do you have the time and/or knowledge to do it yourself? Every website eventually needs maintenance. Backups, program updates, code updates. A little freshening up! It's best to plan ahead for this. Do you have the time and knowledge to do it yourself? When deciding what type of website to choose you need to ask yourself these questions. What are your options? There are many different directions that you can go with the "type" of website you create but here are a few of the more popular types.

Static (X)HTML: Static HTML is web site content that doesn't change and stays the same on every page viewed by a visitor. You cannot interact with the content, change the content, and therefore the content stays the same. It is static is because all the content in the page comes from the HTML code and not an external file such as mysql database, javascript file etc. A static HTML page needs to be manually maintained and updated through the files themselves using a a text editor (e.g. Notepad, TextPad) or web editing tool like (Dreamweaver, Contribute). and then uploaded via FTP to your web host server. This requires knowledge of coding languages such as: (X)HTML and CSS.

Dynamic Web Pages: Dynamic web pages can adapt their content or appearance depending on the user's interactions, changes in data supplied by an application, or as an evolution over time, as on a news web site. Using client-side scripting techniques (XML, Ajax, Flash ActionScript), content can be changed quickly on the user's computer without new page requests to the web server. Most dynamic web content, however, is assembled on the web server using server-side scripting languages (asp, jsp, Perl, php, Python). Both client- and server-side approaches are used in multifaceted web sites with constantly changing content and complex interactive features.

Content Management Systems: Web Content Management Systems (CMS) enable "nontechies" to write content, update and create new web pages with ease. Content Management Systems are becoming more and more popular these days. Once used mainly for large sites containing hundreds to even millions of pages, now used by even some of the smallest sites. The text, graphic, and site management tools in a cms are designed to allow users with little or no knowledge of html or css to create and manage sophisticated web content.

Some of the more popular Content Management Systems are the Open Source Systems such as: Joomla!, Drupal, & PHP-Nuke

Blogs: Easy to use and readily available, web logs, or blogs, are an inexpensive, and widespread form of web content management. Blog software such as Blogger, Tumblr, or WordPress allows nontechnical users to combine text, graphics, and digital media files easily into interactive web pages.

A blog is actually a simple cms, typically designed to support the following features:

• Easy publication of text, graphics, and multimedia content on the web
• Built-in tools that enable blog readers to post comments (an optional feature)
• Built-in rss features that allow subscribers to see when a blog site has been updated

The typical blog is basically an online diary (personal blogs), short commentary on particular subject (politics, technology, specialized topics), or news broadcast (news items, notices, announcements). For a small (ten-to-twenty-page), special-purpose, small business, or department web site, a blog-based site may be all you need to get up and running quickly with a set of friendly, nontechnical editing tools and (usually) such built-in features as calendars, automated category and navigation controls, and automatic rss feeds. If the blog metaphor of posted-content-plus-reader-comments doesn't suit your purpose, turn off the comments features and you have a friendly web site development and editing tool plus a simple cms in one inexpensive package.

What's Next?

Now that you have determined what your website will be about, who might be interested, and how you plan on developing and maintaining the site. It's time to choose a domain name. You may have alread done this, you didn't purchase it yet, did you? See some tips and factors that play into choosing and purchasing a domain name.