Be Creative Before You Purchase Or Create A Website


Before you jump into spending coutnless hours on designing and publishing your website, or spending hundreds on having it done by anyone else you should plan out your full design (or structure). This is very important so that when it comes time to do this long-lasting project you will be well prepared.

Layout the Structure of your website. The basics to getting your website going is to know what type of pages your going to have on your website. These pages can be more complex than you think. Say for example your going to have a homepage, contact page, and a about page. Write these three links out, and branch off other links below them. Like on your contact page you'll maybe have a link to go to a contact form, and/or a link to go to your forums/community. And for your about page you could have information about you, info on your company, info on how you became started, frequently asked questions, and maybe even a reference or how-to guide on how you started your business.

As you can see deciding how many links you will have can be a very time consuming job. But it is always better to have all of this planned out and done before you start designing your webpage, or having someone do it for you. The more info you can provide yourself, or your webmaster will benefit you greatly.

Say for example your webmaster charges you by the hour... If he/she has to spend time thinking of your linking structure you could be paying this person more than you really need to.

Here are some things you should think about before you get started on building your layout structure:

What's the topic of your website going to be based on?

Who are your visitors/clients going to be?

What do you need to gear your advertising towards?

How can you make all of your pages easy to access?

Who are your competitors?

Gather content and important information for your website. After you have your linking structure all setup you will want to start looking around your house, computer, work, or wherever and gather up information about your website's main topic. You will need content to fill up your homepage, contact information for your contact page, and anything and everything else to fill your website with content.

Content will be the number one key to the success of your website. If your content isn't updated regularly, or isn't 100% complete than you will loose visitors and even potential clients/product purchasers.

Try to avoid having links to pages that don't work. This will cause visitors to not click on those links again, or even not come back to your website again. Try to atleast throw a page up with Under Construction, and have some content on there for them to go through.

Back to the point... Be Creative before you Purchase or Create a Website. Dont jump straight into something without knowing anything about it. Ask your self, would you buy a brand new car with no engine knowing you have to use it to get to work the next day? Planning out your website structure is on the same lines as purchasing a car without a engine. You need the content and structure built up before you can get it to run.

About The Author

Charles Nixon - Website Designer. Driven by Creativity. Building websites to increase sales, and web presence. Did you start your business to create a website? Or to run your business? CharlesNixon.com may be the web design firm for you! Competitive prices and your project delivered on time and on budget.

mailto:Charles@CharlesNixon.com


MORE RESOURCES:
RELATED ARTICLES
Free Isnt Always Good - 5 Reasons Why You Need Your Own Website
Often time I've browsed sites and seen the same thing - general rep websites or free hosted sites. Pop ups irritate me from the free sites as does the blatant ads getting in the way of the text, and if you have seen one rep site you literally have seen them all.
Find the Purpose of Your New / Proposed Website
Absolutely everything stems from the purpose of your website - selection of hosting, programming, graphic design, copywriting, internet marketing, autoresponder service, and e-commerce. So it's very important to establish the purpose of your business website first.
Topics to Add When Creating an Alternate and Modern Medicine Web Directory
Alternate medicine finds its own place in the hearts and minds worldwide and has a separate following to back its existence. There are many subcategories that could be added to the modern and alternate medicine website directories.
Live Support from Your Website? Can You Do It for Free?
I'm a freelance programmer and somehow I managed to get clients, speak with them, and generate leads for years without a live help system. To be honest, I had put in bids for a "live" help system several times, and I wasn't aware there were free options out there.
Your Website Should Be Selling
It may come as some surprise to a traditionally off-line business that their website should be attracting new sales, or at least supporting the sales they have made. There is a common misconception that a website is more of a cost than an asset.
Building a Web Store on Shoestring Budget in less than Four Hours
Starting a business online is no longer as difficult as it used to be! Now, there are plenty of interesting business ideas that anybody can pick up from various Internet resources. Startup related cost, which used to deter many in taking action, has become negligible.
Six Basic Reasons Why Visitors Stay On Your Web Site
1. The first page appears quickly.
Tips for Building a Great Business Website
A website is lifeline of internet home business. In order to succeed you must have a website that that meets the general criteria of accepted standards.
Are Web Graphics Stealing Your Money?
They might not be wearing a mask and carrying a gun, but if you've got images on your web pages then they could be costing you a lot more money than you think every time a visitor looks at one. That's because image files are typically the biggest bandwidth user on any web page.
2 Key Ways to Make Your Site a Success
If one more business owner tells me their website sucks because they're just "too darn busy to deal with it", I'm gonna hurl. That's like saying, "I'm doing business in my dirty underwear because I'm too busy to get dressed.
KISS Your Website!
Many web developers today are starting to KISS their website, and it shows!No, I don't mean they get hot and heavy with the monitor, I mean they apply the basic values of Keep It Simple Stupd! (KISS)Many sites today are focusing on high end graphics, advanced java scripts, catchy logos, and other trivial factors. What they don't realize is that it's a win win game if you keep it simple.
Ten Quick Tests To Check Your Website For Accessibility
The Disability Discrimination Act says that websites must be made accessible to disabled people. So how can you check that your website is up to par? There are a number of basic tests you can make to address some of the main issues that provide a good start in increasing accessibility to your site visitors:1.
Is Your Web Site Talking to Your Customer?
A while ago one of my clients approached me and mentioned that they were experiencing a serious problem with customer registrations (obtaining customer names and e-mail addresses), on their web site. They still had a lot of traffic, but were finding that the ratio between traffic and registrations had been dropping steadily.
Developing State-enabled Applications With PHP
Installment 1Developing State-enabled Applications With PHPWhen a user is browsing through a website and is surfing from one web page to another, sometimes the website needs to remember the actions (e.g.
Guidelines for Web Page Optimization
Below, I have listed 8 simple steps that you can take to optimize your web pages. By following these, you will improve your chances of increasing your rankings:1) Target one word for each page: A huge mistake that many beginners make is cramming numerous keywords onto every page.
Ten Major Tips to Develop a Multilingual Web Site to Work
If you are living in a country that its native language is something rather than English language, then you may like to develop your website to offer content in the language of your own country.There are millions of websites on the Internet that are all in English language but there are billions of people on the earth that speak in a different language and are not familiar with English language.
Is Your Website Doomed for Failure Before Youve Built It?
One of the things that many people overlook when building a new website is keywords. I have to admit, I did exactly the same thing myself when I started out.
Whats Your Business Online Attitude?
This article was prompted by some customer support work I was involved in for a private members site. One of the paid subscription members wanted someone to look over his website and give an opinion of what we thought of its design.
Traffic for Webmasters
"If you build it, they will come"; is an age old phenomenon for webmasters that they develop the website and visitors themselves would visit that. This may be true for only a handful of websites but the most important and crucial topic for any webmaster today is to how to get targeted traffic to his website.
Effectively Using Robots Meta Tags
The "robots" meta tag, when used properly, will tell the search engine spiders whether or not to index and follow a particular page. For the purposes of this article, we will be using the "( )" symbols to represent the "" in html coding.