Welcome
Where do I get started? What should I do? However, it does not have to
be this way, creating a web page can be a fun and rewarding experience if you
just follow a few simple guidelines, which we will outline for you here.
The first thing to do is select the building programme you are going to use,
(That’s where this web site comes in) so look at all the parameters of the
various web builders and decide which one suits you best. As you can
probable see this site was built using Yola
What you should do when getting ready to construct your first web page is to
define it. What do you want your web page to do? Do not just start constructing
your page, really think about it. You should think about how you want it to
look, what information you want to provide to your prospective viewer in order
to persuade him to buy your product, service or just peruse information, rather
than going elsewhere.
Be sure that you organize the page well, think of your Home Page like the Table
of Contents page in a book, it is there so that your customers know where to go
in your site for their particular needs, or just to familiarize themselves with
your product. Lastly, when defining your site you should do your research.
Always visit your competitions web site to see how they have organized their
site, so you can make yours better, whether it is just including more
information about your product, or simply making a better designed site.
Now that you have given some serious thought to how you want your web site to
look, and what you want to include in it, you need to think of a name for it.
There are various approaches to finding the right name for your web site. The
first is to make the name logical, for instance, abc’s web site is abc.com.
Another approach is to make the name memorable so that your customers can type
it in without thought, the name does not have to be descriptive of the product
you sell, for example amazon.com sells books. Further, you should keep the name
as short as possible so that it is easy for your customers to type into the url
field.
Now that you have your web page named and given some thought into how you want
it to look, here are some pointers for building your site. If you have pictures
on your web page go over them first with a photo editing program, so that
the customer’s browser does not have to crunch them. This will also speed up
the download speed of your page so that the customer can view quickly without
having to wait for large picture files to appear on the screen.
One of the most annoying things for people surfing the web are pages that take
a long time to download. All those fancy graphics will not do you any good if
instead of waiting for the page to download the viewer closes his browser and
goes elsewhere, so consider going light on the pictures and heavy on the
information content.
You should also put some serious thought into what color fonts you are going to
use, and the background colour as well. When in doubt, remember that a white
background with black text has been successful for thousands of years!
Your website should also be easy to navigate, all your links should be obvious
to the viewer, and should be self explanatory or have information about where
the link will take them. Try to keep the number of links you have low, the
viewer does not want to spend a lot of time waiting for links to download,
chances are, like you, he is pretty busy! Further, always link back to your
homepage in order to make navigating your web page easier for your potential
customers.
Now, before you even open up a web site builder, you should construct your web
site on paper. Decide the number of pages you want to have inside of your site,
and determine logical titles for them. Think of any pictures that you might
want to put on each page and where you are going to put them in order to be
most effective. You should plan out your hyperlinks now, as it will make
keeping track of them later a lot easier and save you time trying to figure out
why they are not working properly. Decide where you want to put any buttons
that you might create for hyperlinks as well. Lastly write out any information
content you will be putting onto your web page in Microsoft Word first so you
can detect any spelling errors you might have made. You can cut and paste parts
into your site later.
Lastly, familiarize yourself with Builder before you start using it. Further,
you should make a practice page first so that you can get a feel for your
builder and some experience using it before you start constructing a page which
you will publish on the World Wide Web.
It takes two to three months to learn how to use Dreamweaver and at least a
month to learn FrontPage, while you can learn most of the builder shown here in
hours. Practice adding and deleting text, pictures, and hyperlinks until you
can do these actions with ease.
Building a web site with is simple and easy if you follow the above steps. The
most important part of the construction process actually takes place before you
open your builder. Think of constructing your web site like taking a test back
in school, those who prepared before the test probably did better than those
who just went in without even opening their books.
So be sure to prepare before you start, think of the content you want to put
in, think about your links, think about your web site’s name, draw up an
outline on paper before you start constructing the page and most
importantly
“Plan Your Work and Work Your Plan”
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