Create a Website

CREATE A WEBSITE

Not a common man has turned to be an Internet Millionaire but people do make a living doing what they like on the net, creating and running successful websites.

Think through what you want the Website to accomplish.
Focus on these questions:

1. What is the purpose of the Website?

2. What do I want my clients or customers to derive from the site?

3. What do I expect from this Website?

4. How can I be informative to visitors, but important to my own customers?

5. How can I keep people on the site and keep them coming back?

6. How can I sell on the Internet?

These tips will prove a lot helpful:

Plan Your Site

Keep your designs simple. A simple design will sell more products. Keep your business simple. There must be a good mix of text and graphics with limited page scrolling. A sole proprietorship may be more equitable to you than a corporation (with partners) when you are first starting out. Keep your overhead low. The more money you have to lay out for your business, the less ends up in your pocket. As much as you may want to provide copious amounts of information, people do not want to read it. When you need to provide text, be kind and limit the width of the text. No one wants to simulate watching a sport on a Website.

Back-end driven Content
All successful web sites have content –Catchy Headlines with two important vision ‘You’ & ‘Free’, good articles, inventory for sale, etc. You is what you have for the visitor and Free is offering 'Freebies'. Focus your Intent on Index main page to meet the visitor’s needs. Some sort of database/CGI type program manages most of this content. These days there are many alternative ways to implement online programs such as the classic CGI/Perl solutions to ASP, PHP, and C; and data base solutions as diverse as MySQL to Oracle. It is wise to choose the simplest solution available for your project. However, you should make sure that it will be able to scale to accommodate your site's anticipated success. Further, make sure that there is not a ready made, free version solution to your programming problem before you hire a programmer or buy a commercial version. There are many excellent resources that list hundreds of quality, free scripts available for download. One note about the content itself, it needs to not only be of high quality ( there is a lot of competition out there! ) but it needs to be constantly updated. If not daily, weekly updates are a must so that repeat visitors feel as if there is a reason to return. Repeat visitors are a very big key to continual growth. This makes a very good argument to use a programmable solution to manage your content, as the scripts allow you to update content more effectively than you can manually. Chats, Message Boards, E-mail Login, E-greetings are just for the many who sort out for various Interactive contents. To build an audience with content is up to you even without spending huge sum on Web designing or getting into the trap of labeling as ‘Portal’ because many Portals end up just being a mere Website with much hype and hoopla with added unwanted contents.

Check the Download
Speed Time of your site

The main Web page should load in 10-15 seconds or less.The most important aspect of web design may very well be speed. Every successful web site has an integrated design approach that works. Integrated, in that all of the graphics, text, etc. look like they belong together, that they work together to create a whole. Pull up Yahoo in your browser, how fast did it load? By some estimates you only have 30 seconds to grab your visitors interest. Load time - the speed that a site is displayed in a browser is critical. The most successful sites combine graphics optimized for the web with text and (more and more often ) nested tables with background colors to create pleasing interfaces that load quickly.

Appearance

It should be incredibly clean and clear. There should be sufficient white space to make everything look ambient. Keep text in boxes away from the edges. Visitors must be able to read the text. Avoid placing tiny gray text on a black background, or putting text over such a busy background that it's not readable.

Navigation
Text links are great because they're quick and easy to use. If you use graphic links, also use text links, and make sure the graphics are optimized. Always have text links as a basic component. Visitors would like no typos or hyper link errors. Opening new pages is now more acceptable than clicking through pages.

About us/ contact us
Your site must have an "About Us" area so people can check your credentials. It must also provide thorough contact information. Visitors expect a business address and several ways to communicate with the site owner.

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