Planning your first website

Many people that are new to the internet and desperately wanting to get a presence online fail to plan. We all know too well, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. To this date this rule has never been as important, especially with our current situation our economy is in. Listed below are the few basic steps you need to take in creating that big picture of a successful website.

Creating a purpose

Before putting pen to paper, you need to define the role and purpose of your website. Knowing the purpose of your website will prevent you from traveling down the wrong path and wasting precious time. When deciding on what we wanted to achieve with Host Insight, we came up with many ideas but settled on: "To provide our visitors with accurate and reliable information, without the influence of outside parties." Short, sweet and simple. That's all it has to be. Keeping this purpose in mind helps you create websites that are highly focused.

Knowing the purpose of your website will prevent you from traveling down the wrong path and wasting precious time

Find your target audience

If you don't know who you are targeting, how will your visitors know you are trying to target them? This is why it is vitally important to define your target audience. In the first stage this has to be done as narrowly as possible. Once you've done this you can start widening your target market. This focal point is extremely important to keep your website on track. The age group, gender, country they live in, interests are all aspects you can use to define them. Knowing who's going to be interested in your website will save you tons of time and money down the line. If you don't do this you may as well be targeting aliens in space. No offence if you really are!

Content

The purpose and the and the target audience that you have defined for your website gives you a clear indication of the type of content you will need to create for your website. The main reason people use the internet is to search for content, and thus it is vitally important that you create content that is both interesting and useful for your target audience. Whilst researching the type of content you are going to place on your website, write down ideas as they come to mind that you could incorporate at a later stage. Another big mistake people make regarding their content, is that they don't keep it fresh and up to date. A successful website is an ongoing process, and your website should be updated frequently. You may want to consider using some type of CMS (content management system) such as Wordpress to make adding new content a simple process. Apart from return visitors, having a website that is updated frequently is favored by Google and will result in more traffic visiting your website!

Just a side note with SEO (search engine optimization). Many try to make sure that they have the correct amount of keywords in their content titles and bodies, and employ a number of techniques into getting higher rankings on search engines. I say, forget about all of that! As long as you stay true to your target audience and the purpose of your website Google will take notice and traffic will start rolling in at a steady pace. Employing all these tricks often makes your content seem false, which will hurt you much more in the long run.

Structure

Understand what type of content you are going to server to your visitors is vitally important to understand how you are going to display it. The structure of your website plays a key role as to how visitors access and use your site, and to some extent, determines whether they will be repeat visitors or not. Before you even start doing any sketches, write down in what order content is going to be displayed on your website. For example a basic site could have the following:

• Navigation
• Search
• Bread crumbs
• Heading
• Body
• Keywords
• Copyright

Determine all the different elements that will eventually make up your website. Doing this, you will have indirectly created the basic view of how disabled people will view your website too. They can't see layout, images or color. Does this basic structure make sense? This is the building blocks to building an accessible website, which I will go into detail in a later article.

Design

Finally the fun part, which is why most people usually skip to this step first! But be patient. Arriving at this step after follow all the steps puts you far ahead of the rest. You now have a plan, you know which direction you want your website to follow. Making the mistake of designing the look of your website can create headaches down the line. The obvious can often be overlooked without planning, and trying to squeeze them in later can be a big hassle.

On to the actual design. What sets apart a professional looking design, from a novice one is not the color scheme and the beautiful graphics. It is consistency! I cannot stress that enough, creating consistency in your website is the easiest most effective way of creating a professional looking website. Your website will otherwise seem as though it was created in a complete rush, and all that hard planning you did for it will have gone out the window. Other then that, keep the amount of different colors you use to the minimum!

Coding your website

Here you many different options for creating the HTML code for your website. You may take the hand coding option, typing out all the code yourself. You could use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor such as Dreamweaver, XSitePro, KompoZer … Else, if that's not your cup of tea you could outsource completely and there are more than enough people willing to do this for you on freelance listings websites like, Elance and Odesk.

Which ever method you choose, keep in mind that the simpler you keep things the better. This is even more true for HTML. If the coding is untidy and all over the place it becomes a nightmare to update later on, especially if someone else has to do it! Once again, consistency is key to keeping it clean and manageably and this will save you time and money.

Upload, Test, Maintain

Assuming you have gone with one of the hosts on our list, you shouldn't have any problems at all getting your website up and running with their excellent support. There are various ways in getting your site up and on the internet, most WYSIWYG's come with their own FTP (File Transfer Protocol) software, otherwise you may need to download your own. We highly recommend Filezilla for this purpose, as it's not only free and opensource; I have been hard-pressed to find anything better.

Now once your website is up and running, and polished to perfection, please don't treat it as some ancient artifact cast in stone!

Once your website is live, you need to test. Not just do a quick once over, as seems the case with many websites, but you need to thoroughly test it. Make sure there are no spelling mistakes, all the forms are working. Test it in different browsers (one of my biggest fears!). Mistakes like these may seem negligible, but to the visitor they cost you serious points in professionalism.

Now once your website is up and running, and polished to perfection, please don't treat it as some ancient artifact cast in stone! You need to update it frequently and constantly. This is the most important step in ensuring that your website will succeed online, new and fresh content is what is going to make your website thrive!

From planning each and every step of your website, you may notice that there is a lot of work involved. I hope you have come to the conclusion and have realized why planning is so important! It allows you to keep things simple, and again consistent. With the web growing at an alarming rate, you need to maneuver quickly with it otherwise unfortunately you will be left behind!