Introduction
Oh what a tangled web we weave
......... when first a website we conceive!
But you can get it right - first time - by following a few simple rules, being self-disciplined and focussed, and not rushing it. The biggest problem is getting sidetracked and rushing off on interesting tangents. A website is a design, like a picture, and contains elements which must be organised correctly for maximum effect. It also has a purpose other than artistic effect (in most cases), and everything that goes into it must reflect this purpose. Finally, a website is aimed not just at people but also at machines - the dreaded search engines and robots - and must cater for both, without compromising the effect on either. This is the hardest part.
This Guide is aimed at the technically disadvantaged :-) - otherwise known as normal people, not at techno-geeks like myself. It has also taken the minimum cost route for small businesses with small budgets. And it's a long one so pour yourself a glass of wine and settle down!
Lets look at the stages of website development from the initial concept to a fully operating website.
Website Development Stages
- Purpose
- Concept
- Design
- Building
- Content Creation
- Optimising
- Uploading
- Testing
- Promotion
- Monitoring
- Tweaking
- Updating
A bit more than building, uploading and waiting for orders!
Let's now look at these activities in a little more detail.
Purpose
Purpose? That should be obvious! You want to put up a website to sell/display your photographs/pictures etc. Sure. And that's just the point. A website you sell from will be totally different in appearance and character from one you build to display your wedding pictures, won't it? So you need to think about the purpose of the website and define it clearly in your mind: when you've done that, write it down on a piece of paper and stick it above your monitor. Before you start adding bits and pieces to your site, decide if these fit the purpose of the site. For example:
"This site is to sell orchids and exotic flowers internationally, and to promote orchids as decorations."
Now you wont be tempted to add a bit about varieties of Easter Lilies or the roses in your garden. People visiting your site will expect information about orchids and exotics and won't be really interested in Easter Lillies, so why turn them off? It will also help you choose a suitable domain name. Focus.
Top
Concept
Now this is where you really have to start thinking. For example:
Start with the third item first - this will limit your target market. Now refine your target market. All of the above? One of the above? Another target group? Or a part of one group - shall we say boutiques?
- Do you want a vivid site in bright primaries or a gentle one in delicate pastels?
- Who are your target customers - large corporates, small businesses, the up-market rich or the average house-proud citizen?
- How expensive are your products?
What kind of boutique? Avant Garde, High Street Fashion, Classy, Professionals, Expensive, Designer? What age group do they aim at? Teens, Young Adults, Middle Aged, Outsize?
Get the picture? When you have decided on your market, the website concept or theme will begin to take shape in your head. Now do a search on Google or Yahoo for similar businesses - "boutiques for young adults" or "fashion for the middle aged". Look at their websites, print (in colour preferably) those which you find attractive. Take your time, this is an important step and will be hard to change once you are past the design stage. You now have a starting point for your own website - colours like this site, banners like that, menu like another or maybe an idea of your own. It's easier to start with a picture than with a blank sheet of paper.
Design
OK, so you now have some ideas. It's time to get out another piece of paper (a large one this time) and your crayons, poster colours or water colours, or whatever your kid uses :-) You can also use a Paint program or a WYSIWYG editor if you have one and know how to use it, but I'm assuming for the moment that you do not. You might look at our Formats Guide at this point, you can keep the new window open at the same time as this one.
Draw a rectangle, similar to a web page, and broadly define what you need. You don't have to be an artist (though this will obviously help) to create a rough outline of your site. Start with just the banner and the menu backgrounds, and leave the content area blank. If you have a scanner you can scan and print several copies (in colour), else just do it again with your paints. Keep the original safe - you might need it later.
Now add some graphics - hand drawn, pasted cutouts, whatever. Add your chosen menu style - buttons, text, horizontal, vertical, backgrounds etc. How does it look? Not happy? Get another copy and start again. Remember, you're not trying to create a masterpiece for the Tate - it's just a rough to give you an idea of the look and feel.
Now it's time to add some text. There are three types of text, basically - Headlines (or Headers), Boxed (to draw attention, can also have a different background colour) and normal. Prepare some rubbish text on your wordprocessor. I use "Lorem Ipsum" which is a Latin text - you can find it through Google. The idea is to be able to view the appearance of the text without being distracted by the actual content. (This only works if, like me, you are ignorant of Latin :-) Now cut up this text and place it on your page. Try single column, two or three columns etc. Add headlines (larger and bolder text, try various sizes) and Boxed text (just draw a border around the text) and play with the layouts until you like the overall appearance of the page. By this time you will know which effect suits you best - columns, boxes etc.
Building the Site
Now, unfortunately, we must get a little technical (unless you prefer to send me your design :-). Websites are written in HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and although it is within the capability of most people to acquire this language, it is not advised at this point - unless you really want to do things the hard way! (I do, but then, I've been a techno-geek for decades). There is an easier way and it's sitting on your computer (MicroSoft FrontPage - if you have a PC with Windows). For user's of Macs and the older PCs, it is still possible to avoid HTML. There are dozens (hundreds?) of *FR*EE* web design programs available - on the internet and also on the cover disks which accompany PC magazines. Space does not permit a tutorial on FrontPage or any other design package, so I'm going to suggest that you find a package and get thoroughly familiar with it before continuing. Several PC magazines have excellent tutorials on the packages they give away, so an hours browsing in W H Smith will be very beneficial. Go to it, play around with the package for a couple of weeks until you are quite familar with it, then come back to this Guide. Alternatively, you can sign-on with a Hosting company who provide a do-it-yourself website system - templates, graphics etc., which you can use on-line. Have fun!
Welcome back!
Before we continue, a word of warning - don't be too ambitious on your first attempt. Things will get horribly complicated and you'll be tempted to abandon the site. Another word of warning - do not use fancy fonts. Unless the viewer of your site has the same font on his PC (or Mac) he will not be able to see what you intended. Stick to the standard fonts throughout - Arial, Tahoma, Verdana, Times New Roman. The fancy fonts you see on SiteSpinners are not text - they are graphics.
Content Creation
Content is all the text you create for your site, and also the graphics. First, the text.
The textual content will vary across the different pages on your website, but the golden rule to follow is that - except on the "About Us" - page, you minimise the use of "we" and "our" and any personal pronouns, and use "you" instead. Why? Because the constant use of "we" indicates that you are talking about yourself - essentially telling the visitor how great you are. Your visitors are much more interested in what they will get out of it. Make them the focus of your site. This is very hard initially, but you will eventually get accustomed to it. This is, of course, for commercial sites - personal sites will normally be expected to use personal pronouns.
The Home Page is particularly important as this is your first contact with a potential customer, and where you introduce the customer to your products and services. Instead of saying "Our prices are the lowest in the South East" it is better to say "You can save 20% on the normal retail price for .....". Instead of saying "We guarantee satisfaction .." say "If you are not satisfied you can have your money back". And so on.
The second point concerns the nature of the information. Visitors to your site are looking for information, so educate them. They will have a higher opinion of you because you obviously "know your stuff". If you are selling Ginseng (for example) then "Korean Ginseng £3.99" tells them nothing other than the price. Try "Korean Ginseng from Katama Province, a rare and particularly potent extract. The Katamas are very long-lived and attribute their longevity to this variety of Ginseng". A "... more" link after will take them to another page with much more information about the product. Now you've got them hooked, and, there's nothing unethical or even hypey about it, as long as it's true, so you may have to do some research. People want information, so give it to them.
What about information pages? Apart from your Home Page and your About Us page, the rest of the site is about your products. Make your site interesting and your visitors will come back. Add an Articles page, a News page. a Links page. You don't have to write it all yourself - there are hundreds of sources of articles on the Internet who will allow you to re-publish their articles as long as you give them acknowledgement and keep their "Resource Box" intact. For example, while I was in Hong Kong I found dozens of Ginseng shops. They all displayed framed Ginseng roots (real, not pictures) and prices went up to £5000. I enquired and was told that these were particularly old roots, some over 100 years of age, and VERY potent. They were prepared by immersion in hot water, soaked, and the infusion decanted into bottles with a warning that only a few drops at a time should be taken - else paralysis could occur. Did you know that? Did you find it interesting? So will your customers.
See our Content Guide.
Which brings me to pictures and graphics. Unless you are catering for youngsters avoid scrolling banners, flashing text and graphics, music which can't be switched off, and too many (or glaring) graphics. Recent research indicates that this will work against you, at best by being ignored and worst by compelling the visitor to go to another site. Flash, if you must use it, should be used sparingly, with a "Quit" button clearly visible. Not everyone has broadband or wants to be entertained. People are at your site for information.
Graphics themselves, whether photographs or clip-art, should be used sparingly and should be small in size. If you are going to do your own graphics you will need to get (and master) a suitable paint program. I use PaintShop Pro which is almost as good as the very expensive professional packages and a fraction of the price, sometimes on special offer at www.Amazon.co.uk and other sites. Also IrfanView, which is very useful if you don't need a full-blown paint package, and just want to re-size and optimise your graphics. It's also FREE.
See the Graphics Guide for more information.
Optimising your site
What do I mean by optimising? Well, apart from graphics sizes and content aimed at the customer, we must also make the site Search Engine friendly, and give the Web Bots something tasty to chew on. Remember the robots I mentioned earlier? Well, Search Engines and web bots are colour blind, and they don't even see graphics. All they munch is text. And they're fussy about text too - it has to be related to the Meta Tags on your site.
Meta Tags? Oops! Haven't I told you about Meta Tags? Here we go.
At the beginning of your web page code, in the head section, are a couple of code words called "Meta"s. (Right click on this page and click on "View Source"). One is for your website description and the other for Keywords. Web Bots love both and use them for indexing and cataloging your site on the search engines. The first is obvious. The second is the one which helps you to be found when someone does a search on one of the engines.
Let's go back to our Orchids & Exotics example. You do a search on Google on "Orchids UK" and get back a list of sites which are related to Orchids. How? These sites had the word "Orchids" as one of their Meta Keywords. You will probably get 10000+ references in your search and you are obviously not going to look through all of them, particularly as you are looking for a specific orchid. So you search again, this time on "Wild British Field Orchid". This time you get only a few hundred results. Because only a few hundred sites had "wild british field orchid" as one of their Meta Keywords!
Simple isn't it? You just add words relevant to your site to the Meta Keywords and people find you. Well, not quite. You see, you have to get listed on the search engines, and your listing has to be fairly high up (in the first three pages of results generally) for people to find you. And your position in the lists are dependent on your "hits". Catch22! And the Web Bots are fussy, as I said earlier - they expect 3 - 5 occurrences of your Meta Keyword on your page (in the text) before they consider your page worth listing anywhere above last position. So your content has to contain multiple occurrences of your keywords. So what? So this! Repeating a word over and over again, indiscriminately, will make your content indigestible to people, even if the Web Bots love it. "Orchids, Orchids, Orchids. Buy my lovely Orchids". Get the picture?
[A word of caution is appropriate at this point. Some website owners/designers try to fool the Web Bots by using "invisible" text (font colour the same as the background) stuffed with keywords so that the Bots are well fed and the visitors aren't bothered. in a word DON'T - unless you want to get de-listed, possibly permanently, by the major Search Engines, the only ones that really matter. They are wise to this and many other (unethical) ploys, and content is frequently checked by human editors. Stick to the straight-and-narrow and provide good content, and don't let a "clever" (and possibly unscrupulous) designer convince you to do otherwise. You have been warned!]
So, your beautifully written, extremely interesting (to people) content has to be butchered for the sake of these pesky Web Bots! Grrrr! Well, actually, if you start with this in mind it's not too difficult. Obviously, you can't have too many keywords, so the first priority is to select the most relevant and important ones, then write your content so that you can repeat these words without it sounding false or hypey. WIth practice it becomes easier.
Two more points. Your important keywords should also occur in the page Title and in your Headers. It's even better if one or more are present in your URL (website address), for example "www.WildBritishOrchids.com". The second point is very important - create a Site Map which has direct links to all your website pages, with descriptions. This will make the Web Bots' job much easier.
Uploading your site to the World Wide Web
Well, that's the hard bit out of the way. Now you can upload your site to the Web so that the world can see it. Not too difficult - assuming you've chosen and bought your domain name and arranged a host! Ah! Should have mentioned this earlier. No problem, it's quick and easy. See the Domains Guide and Hosting Guide for more information.
To upload your site you'll need an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. There are plenty available for free, but your hosting service will probably provide you with one when you sign up. It's usually on the Control Panel they give you. Your host will also point you at the information on how to use the Control Panel facilities. Don't worry - it's a doddle.
Testing
So you've built your website. Its on the Web. Congratulations! Does it all hang together and work ok?
Huh? It looked good on your PC, sure, but until you put it on the web you can't be sure. So, start Explorer or Netscape or Opera or whatever browser you're using and enter your site URL (Uniform Resource Locator - real tech speak for website address!). Homepage ok? Check. All text ok? Everything in the right place, especially pictures. Graphics look ok? No distortion? Great. Now check all your links - go through your menu and click on each menu item. Now check each page as above. Do the same for each menu item. Any external links (to other websites)? Click on them. Do they all go to the right sites? No "Page not found - Error 404" errors?
Congratulations! If you had any errors you would have to go back to your website package and see what had gone wrong. It's difficult finding errors in the early days, but it does get easier. Usually :-)
Promotion
Your website's up and running - along with almost a billion other websites. So you need to bring it to the attention of surfers and potential customers. How?
The first step is to put your site on the search engines. The obvious ones are Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, MSN, AOL etc., Unfortunately, some of these cost money - if you are a commercial website. But there is a way around this. Put your site on Google first (still free, at the time of writing, and a fairly boring exercise as you first have to find the exact classification of your site by working through the directories, but worth it) and then on as many free SEs as you can find. Avoid using SE software - there are plenty of free software packages around which claim to put you up on dozens (hundreds) of SEs, but the important SEs normally require manual submission and have ways of forcing you to do this. It's tedious work but necessary.
There is one way which shortens the process a bit - websites designed for SE submission. Sign-on with www.ineedhits.com and use their free SE submission service which will put you up on about 30 fairly important SEs. Some will allow you to submit multiple pages, others the Homepage only. Make sure that the keywords you use are valid for the page submitted. While you are doing this you will see ads for other multiple submission sites which you can use. Go to them by opening a new window (press "Shift" while clicking on the link) and then minimise the window and continue with the original submission. Then come back to the new window and start again. This way you can skip those engines which are common to both sites in the new submission.
Once you get listed on Google you will find that your site is picked up by the paid SEs - Yahoo, MSN etc., so a Google listing is important.
But promotion isn't just about Search Engines. Anything you do to draw attention to your website will help, and you should use other methods as well. Spread the word among your friends, customers, relations. Do a press release for your local paper. Search Google for the small business directories and sign up with the free ones. Establish reciprocal links with non-competing but relevant businesses, but don't put these links on your Homepage - create a Links page instead.
See the Promotion Guide for more information.
Monitoring your site activity
Now that your site's up on the web you need to know about your visitors. How many, where from, which pages did they like best/worst etc. If you don't check this information regularly you will have no way to measure the success of your site, and without this further promotion will be blind. First, go to the Control Panel on your hosting service and find the "Stats" button. Clicking this will give you a series of statistics on accesses to your site. Don't take the "Hits" figure too seriously at first - the Web Bots will have visited you for the first time and devoured every item on your pages. And remember that every graphic on your page counts as a hit - so a page with 6 graphics will result in 7 hits, one for the page and one for each graphic. The really important figures are:
Number of Visitors (Unique/Repeat) andNumber of Pages downloaded (Page Impressions)
If your hosting stats do not give you these figures you may need to buy some software or sign-up for a service which provides them.The next thing you need (if you are using Explorer) is the Google Toolbar. Go to www.Google.co.uk and download the Toolbar. Now, when you bring up your site you will see the Google page rank in the toolbar. Initially this will be blank, but after a couple of months - if you have an interesting site and are getting hits, you will see the rank increase. You need to get to a page rank of 5 before you start seeing some real activity on your site. The other nice thing about the Google Toolbar is the fact that you can search on Google from any web page, without having to go to Google.
Finally, you need to monitor the popularity of your keywords. Do a search on Google for each keyword and see if you are listed in the first 5 pages of results. If, after a couple of months, you are still way down in the lists you may want to review your keywords and add to them. Do not remove any - just add to them and ensure that these occur in your content. You may also need to rewrite (some of) your content.
Tweaking
This is the process of making small running changes to your web pages. Re-wording a phrase to make it more attractive, highlighting an item, adding new keywords etc. These should not be random changes, but as a result of reviewing your statistics. Occasionally you may see a phrase on another site which grabs you, and you can adapt this for your own content. Do not copy the wording exactly - I'm sure you can be inventive.
Updating
Websites cannot remain unchanged (unless they are your wedding pics, and you can even add to those - new house, new baby etc.). Fresh content is important, the more interesting the better. The Web Bots will visit regularly and harvest your new material, so make a point of updating your pages regularly. Add an "Updated on xx/xx/xxxx" phrase where surfers can see it. Even better, have a "New" link to take the surfer to a page with new items. Add to the articles page as ofen as possible. Put up links to new and relevant sites. This will ensure that your pages will be refreshed on the search engines, and will help you gain page rank and, therefore, customers. And always check online after changes - a broken link (one that is incorrect and results in a 404) can be damaging.
Conclusion
Whew! There's a lot more to running a website than you thought, isn't there! It's a continuing process but, if you get organised, it is not too complex or time consuming. Once you're over the learning curve it becomes a lot easier. Your site will grow and your hits will increase with time, if you follow the suggestions in this article, and customers will come. And remember, just a few sales will pay for your site development costs, maybe just one, and you have a 24x7x365 advertisement which is visible worldwide.
May you have a multittude of hits, regular sales, and business success.