Guide To Producing A Website: For Beginners

Website Creator magazine editor - John Taylor, presents this simple Three step guide is a great place to start as it will help you produce a site youre proud of and save you a lot of time. Creating your own website is much more than designing a web page, but the good news is it has never been easier to put your ideas on to the Internet. You can produce a your family site, or a corporate site using templates which can be customised in such a way that your site wont end up looking like everyone elses. Templates and web wizards are great because they help you to produce a professional looking site, even if your design capabilities are limited, or you are just pushed for time. Creating a website these days is so simple anyone can do it, but this is still a closely guarded secret as industry Web Masters dont want you to know. This guide will get you started arm you with the knowledge that will enable you to create your family or a professional business website.

First: Plan your Website Taking a bit of time to plan the structure and layout is guaranteed to save you time and make adding pages and updating your website easier in the future. A little planning saves a lot of time, but the amount of planning you do will depend on what you have planned for your website. If this is your first website, and you want to produce a personal or family home site then you might not need much of a plan. A family website can be as simple as one web page called the home page. When you register your domain name most good domain registration agents provide a home page as parking for the site. This is like staking out a claim on your little patch of Internet land. However, if you are planning for your site to have more than one page putting a little thought into the structure of your site will help. Take a look at our anatomy diagrams to get some ideas on site layout.


These plans will insure each of your pages has a weblink and therefore, can be read by your users, there is nothing more frustrating than producing a web page, publishing the site and realising many weeks later no one can actually get to the page as you havent provided a link on any of the other pages to it. The thought you put into planning your site will help you get a grip on what should be on every page of your site. Your plan can be a simple pencil and paper sketch (I recommend a pencil because you can make changes with a pencil and an eraser). Note at this stage dont involve your PC you will find a sketch quicker and easier. Your sketch needs to have a structure. It should contain a succinct guide of what information your site will contain and where. Furthermore, you need to highlight what links you will have on the page, for example, what pages it connects to and what pages connect to it. Finally, you need an idea of what will the page look like, what colour scheme will you use, what fonts, and what will your buttons look like. (Note you can get free templates on the web that will provide a quick start and bypass this part of the planning). However, if you are looking for a unique website that no-one has seen before you will need to go through this planning stage.

The bigger more complicated Website, the more complex the planning will need to be, and the more important it is not to skip this stage. Dont let a big site frighten you into submission so you run away screaming. Take the common sense approach, and break the big problem down into a series of little sections a section can literally be a section of your website or even as small as one page. Plan each of these little bite sized sections of your site, and soon you will have completed the whole thing without drama. It doesnt matter how big your site is a simple sketch can still contain all the information you need for a section of your site you will just end up with a big pile of sketches. Finally, you need one master sketch that represents the outline or site map. There are no hard and fast rules as to what you should put in your sketches, thats up to you and your time constraints. The usual rule of thumb is that the more time you spend planning the less time you spend building and tweaking your website.

Second: Create your Web pages Web pages are the elements of your site. Every web page is created in a web language called HTML (which stands for HyperText Markup Language), you can learn how to become a HTML programmer or use a web page design package to produce your pages. We recommend you start by using a web page design package. It is possible to create your website by programming it in a web language known as HTML using this method you dont need any special software all you need is a text editor such as NotePad or WordPad both are supplied free with Windows. Hand coding as its called used to be the only way of producing pages. We would not recommend it these days as it means you will need to learn the programming language and HTML is not at all friendly.

I recommend you use a graphical web page What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor . The editor will then generate HTML code for the pages. The advantages of using HTML to code your pages are that you have complete control of your pages the disadvantage is that unless youre a great designer they will look dated and lack style. 3 Put it on the Web If you build it, they will come, but only if you have your search engine optimisation right! Before prospective users can view your Website, you must first publish it this involves getting a domain name then copying your web pages to a web server or host and finally registering with the search engines. Finally you can buy a commercial package, Dreamweaver from Adobe is the industry standard but Magix Website Maker or homepage MAKER from bhv is also worth a look if youre a beginner. When you have finished building your site you will need to think of a domain name and register it.

A domain is your little bit of the Internet, its your turf, your real estate. Your little bit of the Internet needs to be uniquely identifiable. Your domain name is also your website address or URL, (explained in my previous blog entry) Therefore, why would you pay for a domain name, especially if your favourite name is already taken? Typing either your domain name, your name or your company name into a search engine is the way most visitors will find your site, so you dont want to be remembered as a little chunk of a much bigger site. Not registering a domain name and using a sub domain name, means you will end up with a long non-memorable name which users wont type into any search engine. For example, many free web hosts assign you a domain name, which may be long and tricky to spell, for example, www.essential-mags.porter5.com. www.essential-mags.com would be much easier to remember and to type into a search engine. Having your own domain name also presents a much more professional image of yourself or your company and can be seen as on a par with designing your company logo or headed paper and business cards. A clever carefully thought out name can get you remembered, just look at two examples www.google.com and www.ebay.com. Who on the planet has not heard of these names!

Once you think you have your domain name bounce it around as many people as possible to get their feedback, they might even come up with a great name out of the blue. When you finally have your name you need to check its available, but be prepared for disappointment as you can bet someone will have gotten there before you. See the box to the left for websites that will help you check your domain is still available.Once you have your site layout, your domain name and your web pages you are ready to publish them on the internet. If you build your own web pages using a graphical web page editor then the pages are stored on your PC. In this case, you will have to register with a web host, such as Host1Plus offering packages to suit all pockets, including packages that include registering a domain name, web space, traffic band width (visitors to your site), email and tools to build your site.....

More information here: http://blog.host1plus.com