You might own a small business or run a youth group. Now you want to build a website. How do you begin?
You don’t have to hire expensive web professionals to do the job. You might consider doing the job yourself, or at least a portion of it. There are three main steps to accomplish what you need.
You can publish your website through a hosting company. However, you don’t have to host it on your computer.
You will be able to use many of the free software packages to create and design your website if you can switch between a Windows PC and Word. Even if you are not confident in building a website, it is worth getting ideas together to save money. You know your business and organisation better than anyone!
This article will give you some suggestions. Let’s take a look at the content you will have on your website. Remember, you can always start small and grow later. You can always add more information later. Your website should reflect who you are, the information you wish people to know about your company, and what you have to offer (either by way of sale or facilities), as well as where you can be contacted. A list of headings might be enough to start develop your website.
Table of Contents
Name of the organisation
A brief description of who you are and what your activities are
It is important to know where you are located, especially if clients or customers are going to visit your premises.
You will need separate pages for each activity you engage in (or the range of goods or equipment that you sell).
Prices for membership and goods
Contact Details
Research is important as you will find similar organisations. Look at Yahoo! and Google to see what information they have and how they are organised. Try to imagine yourself as a customer. Is it easy for you to find the information that you need? Why not? Note down what you think they could improve on their websites.
Think of yourself as the competition. What can you offer that is unique? Are your membership fees or prices higher? Perhaps you offer better quality. You might be able to offer more value if your prices are lower. If you’re thinking of a site for youth clubs, what is your organisation’s uniqueness?
Copyright protects all content on the internet. You must not copy text blocks or images and present them as your work on your site. However, you can reprint articles like this provided that the author is credited. Articles relevant to your business might be a good way to put content on your website.
Look at the layouts and colour schemes of other websites when you’re looking at them.
Site layouts can vary widely.
Some sites have simple black text and white background. This is the most common. Others are more colourful. Consider your target audience. A youth club might want to appeal to a younger crowd, so they may use bolder colours. Sites that appeal to older people might be less obvious. You can see the various gimmicks used: sound, pictures and movies, flash intros, flash intros, RSS tickers (newsfeeds), and sound, pictures, movies, flash intros. These gimmicks don’t need to be used when you build your first site. However, if they appeal to you, you can file the information. You may feel that adding these features to your site is beyond your capabilities, but you’ll be amazed at how quickly you become an expert if your decide to build it yourself.
After doing your research and gathering basic information about yourself, it is possible to come up with ideas for how your website should look and what content you need. The next step is what? You could approach a web developer to help you turn your ideas into websites, but why not do it yourself? It will end up being a lot more affordable.
Let’s take a look at the software.
Websites are often written in HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language. But you don’t have to remember this. A software package like Dreamweaver or Frontpage can be used to build your website with HTML. This is a tedious process that will require you to learn all the code. An HTML generator is a good choice if you don’t want to be a programmer.
An HTML generator allows you to create a website with similar functionality as Microsoft Word. You can insert text boxes, images and other elements. The HTML generator uses drag-and-drop functionality so you can place them where you want them on your page. It will make it easy to create a menu that allows your visitors to navigate your site. As you become more skilled, you will be able to add audio or movies to your page. The HTML generator will transform the page you are currently working on into HTML code that can be published. This is the beauty of web building tools that work in this manner. You will be looking at the pages as your visitors do. Therefore, you can easily experiment with different layouts until you find the one you like.
A lot of web hosting packages include a free website builder. However, these tools are not necessarily free. You will only be able to publish your site with the company that provides the tool. While this is not necessarily a problem, you should investigate how much your web hosting package will be with the company before building your website. It can be disappointing to find out that the hosting package you choose is too costly after building your website. It would help if you remembered that nothing is free, but you can still find a great package. Vodahost is an example of a great value hosting package that includes a web builder with simple to follow online tutorials.
Publish your website
We have already mentioned that you can only publish your website with the same company that provided the web-building tool.
After you have created your first page, you can make it available on the internet. Publishing a website is easy. Your business can be included in the online community with a click of a button. You will expect to find it in a search engine, but this is unlikely! You will need to market your website like in a real business.
Good luck, and have fun! You can build websites, a new hobby that anyone can enjoy in the 21st century.
