So you have decided that you absolutely need a website. Before you dive in, I would like to share with you ten things you would need to know on how to build a website, in order to ensure the success of your website project.

How to Build a Website Item #1.

A website address (or URL): Your website address is the location at which customers will find you. Ideally, you will want to use your business name. (yourbusinessname.com). If your name is not available, then try using keywords that relate to your business. For example, a lawyer in New York might use NewYorkLawyer.com. Ensure that your web address is easy to remember. If your web address is something that is commonly misspelled, be sure to purchase the URL for the misspelling of the address as well.

How to Build a Website Item #2.

Web hosting: In order for your files to be live on the internet, you will need a web host. A website is comprised of files, and a web host is able to make those files live on the internet by hosting them on a web server. Look for a web host that provides 24-hour support.

How to Build a Website Item #3.

A plan: You need a plan before getting started. It’s important to understand the goal of your website and your expectations in order to get there. Trust me it, it will save you a lot of time and money.

How to Build a Website Item #4.

Logo: Do you have a business logo? If you don’t, it’s time to make one. A logo is one of the ways to brand your business, and should be used on all of your marketing materials so your customers will recognize it.

How to Build a Website Item #5.

Images: Images help to tell a story as well as help you communicate with your target market. You can either use stock images or your own images. If you are a photographer, wedding planner, interior designer, or are in a visual industry, you’ll want to use your own images. If not, you’ll want to select stock images that will powerfully relay your message.

How to Build a Website Item #6.

Website content/text: Your website needs to look good, but it also needs to get your message across. The content of your website should do two things. 1) Sell your products and services/communicate your message. 2) Be search engine friendly by including keywords that are relevant to your business. If you are a bakery in Boston, and your prospect is searching for “bakery in Boston,” keyword rich web content will help these prospects find your site. A professional copywriter can write content that both communicates your message and is search engine friendly.

How to Build a Website Item #7.

Professional website design: What would a website be without a beautiful design? There are many designers to choose from. However, not all website designers are created equal. Pay attention to the web designer’s portfolio to review the professionalism of their work. In addition, see how helpful they are in answering your questions and giving you the information you need to make a well informed decision.

How to Build a Website Item #8.

Content Management System: If you plan on updating information to your website on a regular basis, then you will need a content management system that allows you to make changes to your website on your own, without having to go back to the designer. Most businesses out there won’t need a CMS, but if you are a large online retailer or have ambitious growth plans, then considering a CMS might be a good idea. It will make your website updates much easier and more streamlined.

How to Build a Website Item #9.

Blog: Blogs are an amazing way to build a long-term relationship with your prospects and customers. Blogs are truly interactive and are updated frequently, so it gives you a great forum for interacting with the very people that will buy your products and services. It’s also a great way to build your list for frequent email communications. If you are interested in starting a dialogue with your target market then adding a blog to your website is a great idea.  It’s also a great tool that will help bolster your search engine optimization efforts.

How to Build a Website Item #10.

Commitment to marketing: If you build it, they won’t necessarily come- unless you commit yourself to marketing. It’s important to build it well, stay committed to keeping the information accurate, and know that marketing is going to be of utmost importance if you want your site to generate leads and bring results to your business.

5 Tips to Improve Your Website Design

Stop customers from leaving your website because of poor website design.Visit Here Now http://free-websitemaking.blogspot.com

 You can stop that from happening and keep those customers right there on your website. How can you do that? Here are 5 tips to improve your website design so you keep your customers on your site and keep them coming back.

Tip Number 1. The first method is to make sure your typography of your content is suitable. Make sure your lines are spaced out accordingly to the text and sentence structure. Check your font and font size that you are using. You may like using a 10-Pixel text in Times New Roman but is that big enough for all to read. Do you have to strain to read the text? If so increase the text size and maybe change the font. As we get older our eyes are not like they use to be so make sure your font size, font style, and sentence spacing is easily readable.

Tip Number 2. Reduce large images so your web pages load quickly. There is nothing more bothersome than to have to wait on images and graphics to load before the entire website displays. Make sure the important parts of your website loads quickly so you do not lose visitors. Some say a website should load within 15 seconds. After this time, people tend to get disinterested in the site and click off the site. Continuously check your website design for loading time as you are building your website.

Tip Number 3. Content sells a product or service. Updated content will sell your product and service repeatedly. Your website design should include relevant content for the visitor and for search engine optimization. The search engines love content and they love fresh content that is relevant to your keywords. Be sure to break the content up and do not write a paragraph a page long. You are not writing a high school report you are writing website content for your internet visitors. Break the content up by using short paragraphs and white space. It is easier for the reader to read.

Tip Number 4. Have a simple and clear navigation area. A good website design will have a navigation area for the internet visitor that will take them from one place to the next in the website. Test the links to make sure they are directing the visitor to the right page and most importantly are working. The navigation links should be easily read. That means the text size, font size, and color should be distinguishable from the rest of the content. If it is hard to read people will leave the site. In addition to the navigation for navigating throughout the site include a “contact” or “about us” link to your navigation area. This gives creditability to your website. People want to be able to contact someone if they have a question or something is wrong. They also like to read about the business owner. What the business owners credentials are and a little about the business. This builds relationships and people buy more from people they have a relationship with.

Tip Number 5. This last tip involves testing your website. What do I mean by testing your site? I mean to test it out like you are the internet visitor. Whatever HTML editor or program you use to design your website you should be able to click on a button to preview your website in a web browser just how it would look on the World wide Web. Test the links to make sure they direct you to the information that they pertain to and you instructed. Pay close attention to your load time, and your layout of your website. Is the content easy to read and understand? How does my graphics look? Are they overwhelming? Is the color scheme of my website off and not matching the feel of my website style? Are my paragraphs justified properly and is all spelling correct?

These tips above will help you in your website design process to ensure a professional appearance of your internet business. Step back and look at your website from your customers perspective and ask yourself is this a site that I trust to provide me with the type of service or product, I need. If you answer yes then you have completed a successful website design and if you answer no just go back and correct it until you get it right. Remember Rome was not built in a day.Visit Here Now http://free-websitemaking.blogspot.com

I recently decided to build a website and was determined that I would do this for free. I started my research in earnest and I used the web as the primary tool.

Now if you have ever done this you most definitely have found, as I did, that you get bombarded with so much useless information, scam artists and effectively very little information that can show you how to do this free.

It took me almost two weeks to sort through the rubbish and eventually come up with a plan. Fortunately it just took me a couple of days to implement this plan. So in summary here are the steps that I took to build a free website:

In summary the biggest obstacl for me was getting to the right information and staying focussed as you could spend hours signing up to useless sites, reading emails and getting ’supposed’ free downloads.

Follow the 5 easy steps to building your own free website at www.thewebsitenovice.com.

I guess many of us have definitely tried to build a website of our own and have failed. I know this because even I was in the same category until one of colleague as well as friend taught me to build a website step by step. So I would like to share the same here.

The first thing you have to decide before building your website is the theme or the subject of the website, it does not matter if there are thousand other websites with the same subject because later you can improvise on that by putting better contents than those sites. It is better if you choose a subject that is of your interest and something that you know a little more than others so that you can write more.

There are many ways of creating a website, by using HTML templates, by using website builder software, by using bloggers, wordpress etc. I prefer wordpress for a beginner as it is very easy to maintain.

First step in creating a website is domain registration, there are hundreds of sites available on the internet which will do the domain registration, but as a beginner start with a free domain registration site like www.co.cc, here you will have to sign up for a account and check for the domain name you want, because most of the times the domain names will be already registered by someone else. While choosing your domain name do not go for a very long name instead use very short and unique names which the users can remember easily. No problem if you use numbers in between the domain names like www.its4you.co.cc, etc.

Once you are done with this you need to sign up with a hosting site, which will host your website, again there are thousands of websites that will provide free web hosting, so go for a free hosting plan. I prefer the site www.x10hosting.com or www.awardspace.com. Once you register you will be directed to control panel of the site, where you will find many options like FTP manager, Domain manager, MySQL manager etc. Here you need to set up a FTP (File transfer protocol) account in the file manager using a user name and password and also create a database in MySQL manager using a user name and password. (Note that the FTP and Database user name and password need not be same).

Once you have done this go back to your domain registration site, where you need to fill out some details about your host. (Note that the procedure I am explaining here is for co.cc and x10hosting ) Click on manage domains, click on your domain name and select the set up option, where there are options like name servers, zone record and URL forwarding. First select the name server and put the name server value in the given two boxes (usually name sever values will be like ns1.x10hosting.com and ns2.x10hosting.com). Then click on set up again and edit the zone record with the following values, host – www.xxxx.co.cc (your site name) type – 1D option – A value – xx.xx.xx.xx

For the value option you will need to put the IP address of your host which you can find out by ping method. For example if your sitename is mysite.co.cc then go to command window in windows, type the following command ‘ping mysite.co.cc’. As you type it ,a IP address will be showed, which you need to enter in the value box. Save the settings and you are done with half of the procedure.

Now you will need to link your site with wordpress, so go to wordpress site and download the zipped wordpress 2.8.6, its around 2.2MB. And you will also need a FTP client to upload wordpress to your host, so download Filezilla. Now you need to configure the wordpress, so to do that open the downloaded wordpress folder and open a file with name wp-sample-config.php, in that you will have to give the name of the database name, user name, password and database server name. For example in the wp-sample-config.php file you will find a sentence like, xxxx(‘DB_NAME’, ‘yourdatabasename’); so here replace yourdatabasename with your database name that you created in your hosting site., similarly do for username, password, and server name (DBHost). All this values will be present in MySQLDatabases in your hosting site in case you forget. After changing the following things, rename the file to wp-config.php and save it.

Once you have done this much you will have to upload these wordpress files to your site so open filezilla and in top you will have options like host, username, password, port , so there fill out your FTP account credentials of your hosting site. host will be your website name itself, port can be left empty or put 21. Click on Quickconnect and you should be able to see your directories on your site. Now copy all the files inside wordpress (note that you have to copy all files inside the wordress and not the folder itself) and upload it to your home directory ‘public_html’ on your site. There are around 750 files inside wordpress.

Once done with this you need to install wordpress on your site, its done by typing the following in browser http://www.yoursite.co.cc/wp-admin/install.php. If all the above done successfully then you should be able to see wordpress registration page where you need to enter all details asked and you are now ready to publish your site. You can also upload different themes and plugins into the wp-content/Themes or wp-content/Plugins folder using filezilla also if you want.