Is It Necessary To Have A Website?

You might own (or work for) a small business, a youth club, or another organization, and you've decided (or been asked) to create a website for it. Where do you begin?

You don't begin by hiring expensive web consultants to do the job for you! Consider doing it yourself, or at least a portion of it. What you must do is divided into three stages.

1. Designing a website
2. Create your website with computer software.
3. Use a hosting company to publish your website (you can host a website on your computer, but this is an option for the more technically advanced)

1. Designing a Website

If you know how to turn on a computer and use Word and Outlook, you can use many free software packages to design and build your own website. Even if you decide that making the actual website yourself is beyond your capabilities, brainstorming some initial design concepts will save you from spending too much money paying someone else to tell you what you want. After all, no one knows your company or organization better than you!

Knowing where to begin is frequently the most difficult part. This article will provide you with some ideas. So, let's start with what you're going to put on your website - remember, you can start small and grow from there. Ensure you have all the necessary information first; you can always add more detail later. Your website should include information about who you are, what you want people to know about you, what you have to offer (whether for sale or as a service), where you are, and how to contact you. You could begin with a list of headings such as:

Name of the company

• A brief summary of who you are and what you do
• Where are you located? (particularly necessary if clients or customers are to come to your premises)
• Create separate pages for each of your activities (or ranges of goods or equipment you sell)
• Prices (for membership or goods)
• Contact Information

Investigate other organizations that are similar to yours. Look up Google or Yahoo and see their information and how it is organized. Put yourself in the shoes of a customer: is the information you need easy to find? Why not, if not? Make a list of what you would change about their websites.

Consider yourself as the competition - what can you offer that is unique? Are your prices or membership fees more expensive? Perhaps you can provide a higher level of quality. If your prices are lower, you may want to emphasize the good value you can provide. Even if you are considering a location for a youth club, what distinguishes your organization from the others?

Remember that all the material on the internet is copyright protected, so you must not copy blocks of text or images and present them as your work on your site. However, you can reprint articles like this (as long as you credit the original author), and articles related to your business may be a good way to add content to your website.

When visiting other websites, take note of the layout and color schemes. The way sites are presented greatly - some are simply black text on a white background (probably the easiest to read and good for conveying large blocks of information), while others are very colorful. Consider your target audience,  a youth club will need to appeal to the younger generation so that it may use more vibrant colors. Sites geared toward older people may be more subtle. Consider the gimmicks used: sound, images, movies, flash intros, web polls, and RSS tickers (news feeds). These gimmicks are not required when you first build your site, but if you like the look of them, save the information - you may believe that adding these to your site will always be beyond you, however if you decide to build your site yourself, you will be surprised at how quickly you will become an expert.

2. Building your website

So, after researching and gathering the basic information about yourself, you should have some ideas about how you want your website to look and what content you believe you will require. So, what's the next step? You could now approach a website developer to have your ideas turned into a website, but why not try it yourself? It will be much less expensive in the long run.

Even if you are unsure of your abilities, it is free to give it a shot.

Let's take a moment to discuss the software. Websites are typically written in HTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language (but you don't have to remember that). You can create your website using HTML and a software package such as Dreamweaver. However, this is a time-consuming process that will require you to learn all of the code. You should consider using an HTML generator unless you want to become a computer programmer.

An HTML generator is a web development tool that allows you to design your website like Microsoft Word. It allows you to insert text boxes and images, for example, and it uses drag and drops functionality to place your elements where you want them to appear on the page. There will be simple ways to create a menu so that your visitors can navigate your site, and as you gain experience, you will be able to add items such as movies or sound to your page. The HTML generator will work in the background, converting the page you're working on into HTML code that can then be published. The beauty of web-building tools that work this way is that you will look at the page in the same way your visitors will, so you can easily try out different layouts until you find the formula you think will work.

Many web hosting packages include a free website building tool; however, while the free tools are excellent, you will typically be limited to publishing your site with the hosting company that provides the building tool. This is not necessarily a problem, but it does imply that you should investigate how much the web hosting package with that company will cost you before beginning to build your website. It can be very discouraging to build your site only to discover that the hosting package is too expensive for you! Remember that nothing is ever completely free - but that doesn't mean you can't find an excellent deal! Vodahost, for example, provides a good value hosting package as well as a perfect web-building tool with simple online tutorials.

3. Launching your website

As previously stated, you will typically be limited to publishing your website through the same company that provided your web building tool.

You can publish your first page on the internet once you've finished designing it. It is ridiculously simple to create a website. Your company will be a part of the internet community with the click of a mouse. However, there must be a word of caution. You will publish your website for 'Roy Bloggs Widgets'r'Us' and expect to find it in a search engine - this will not happen! As with any real-world business, you will need to market yourself before the rest of the world can find you.