So you need to have a website

You can have (or work for) a small business, a club of young people or other organizations and have decided (or been invited to) build a website to make it in the information age. Where to start?

Well, do not you start by putting expensive web consultants to do the work for you! Consider doing it yourself - or at least some of the work. What you need to do can be divided into three phases.

1. Designing your site
2. Build your website using the computer software
3. Post your site through a hosting company (you can host a website on your computer, but this is an option for the more technically advanced)

1. Design your site

If you know how to turn a PC, have experience using Word and Outlook you will be able to handle many software packages that are freely available to design and build your own website. However, even if you decide to build the current web site is beyond themselves, gaining some initial ideas on the design together will save you spending too much money to pay someone else to tell you what you want. After all, no one knows your business or organization like you!

Knowing where to start is often the hardest part. This article aims to give you some ideas. So lets look at what you are going to have on your first website - remember you can start small and then grew. Make sure you have the essential information together before, you can always add more details later. Your website should show who you are, what you want people to know about you, what you offer (either for sale or for half of the plants), where you are and / or how to get in touch with you. You can start with a list of items such as:

Organization name

Brief description of what you are and what you do

Where you are (especially necessary if the clients or customers are coming to your premises)

Separate pages for each of the activities that you carry (or ranges of property or equipment is sold)

The prices for membership (or goods)

Contact details

Do some research - there are other organizations similar to yours. Search with Google or Yahoo and see what information they carry, and how they are organized. Position yourself as a customer - is the information you need easy to find? If not, why not? Take notes on what they could improve their sites.

Then think of yourself as the competition - what can you offer that is different? Are your prices or fees higher? Perhaps it is able to offer higher quality. If the prices are cheaper than you should focus on the value of property which can offer. Even if you are planning a site for a youth club is not what makes your organization different from others?

Remember that all material on the Internet is protected by copyright, so you must copy blocks of text or images on your site and submit them as your own work. You can, however, reprint articles like this (as long as you credit the original author), and articles related to your business can be a good way to put content on your site.

When you are looking for other sites to look at the layout and color schemes. There is great variety in how we present the sites - some are simple black text on white background (probably the easiest to read and good to put in large blocks of information), some are very colorful. You should consider your target - a club for young people will want to appeal to new generations, and therefore may have a more bold color. Sites to appeal to the elderly may be more subtle. Look at the tricks that are used - sounds, images, movies, flash intro, web surveys, and RSS ticker (news feeds). These devices are not necessary the first time you build your site, but if you like the look of their store information on - you might consider adding these to your site will always be beyond you, but if you decide to take the step to build your site yourself will be surprised how little you become an expert.

2. Build your site

So, after you have done your research, and after collecting basic information about yourself, hopefully, have come up with some ideas on how you want your website to look for, what content do you think you need. So what is the next step? Well, you could now face a web site developer to turn your ideas into a website - but why not try it yourself? It will be much cheaper in the long run.

Even if you are unsure of your abilities will cost nothing to give it a try.

We speak of the software for a moment. Websites are usually mostly written using HTML, which stands for Hyper Text Mark-up Language (but you must remember that). You can use a software package such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver, and can build your website using HTML. But this is a long process, and will involve learning all the code. Unless you want to become a computer programmer you should use an HTML generator.

A generator is a HTML web building tool that allows you to design your website with functionality similar to Microsoft Word. It allows you to insert a text box, for example, together with images, and uses the drag and drop functionality to allow you to place items where you want them to appear on the page. There are simple ways to build a menu so that visitors can find their way around your site and as you get more experienced, will allow you to add elements such as video or audio for your page. The HTML generator will work behind the scenes, turning the page you are working in HTML which can then be published. The beauty of tools for building websites that work this way is that you will look just like the page your visitors, and so can easily experiment with different layouts until you get the formula you think will work.

Many Web hosting packages offer a free web site building tool - but beware, the free tools offered are very good, but is normally limited to publish your website with hosting companies that provide the tool construction. This is not necessarily a problem, but it does not mean that you should look into what the web hosting package will cost the company before you start building your website. It can be very disappointing to build your site and then find the hosting package is too expensive for you! Just remember, nothing is ever completely free - but that does not mean that you can discover an excellent package! Vodahost, for example, offers a good package worth an excellent hosting and web building tool with easy to follow lessons on-line. For more information visit [http://www.webmasterproductins.co.uk].

3. Publish your site

As we have said, it is normally limited to publish your website with the same company that supplied your web building tool.

After you design your first page you can publish on the world wide web. In fact it is ridiculously easy to publish a website. With a click of the mouse, your business will be part of the internet community. However, you must give a word of warning. You can publish your website for 'Joe Bloggs Widgets'r'Us', and expects to find when you search in a search engine - this will not happen! As the company a 'real world' is to do some 'marketing before the world will be able to find. See other articles in http://www.webmasterproductions.co.uk to give you tips on how to do this!

Finally, good luck and have fun! Construction of the website is a great new hobby for the 21 st Century, that almost anyone can do! ......