Build Your Website

I meet so many people who start the wrong way round, they have a great idea, they throw up a poor website and then spend months wondering why it is not getting anywhere. It is vitally important that you get your website built correctly, from the very start.

If you are building your website yourself with a template:

Make sure you are able to access the ftp files.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is how you upload files to and from the internet. If you are using a template with a control panel, this will be done for you and you will not be aware of any ftp access. As you learn more about websites and how they function you will spot many things that you will want to change for example If you are using a poorly made template with bad coding and you don't have any ftp access then you wont be able to fix it and your website will perform very badly in search engines. This is what i mean by getting it right from the start. A website may look good, but will it perform good?

Hiring a web designer

Make sure the company you choose is fully competent. They could simply be using templates that you could easily build yourself. When clients come to me for web design, i make sure they remain in control. They tell me exactly what they want, how much they want to spend.. and i build under their instructions sticking to their budget. Web design costs as mush as you want to put into it.

Things to think about before you rush into building your website

What are your long term goals for your website?

Make sure your web designer is fully aware of your future plans. A badly built site cannot have the structure edited once built.

  1. Will you need a store and checkout?
  2. Will you need a forum?
  3. Do you want to offer member login?

Knowing what you want before you build will help make your website a success.

Promoting your website

This is step two, but before we move to step two one of the things you need to consider when building your site is how are you going to promote it. Why? Well for example, if your customers are going to come from search engines, you need to make sure your site is SEO friendly. SEO stands for search engine optimisation. I wont go into SEO now as it can be too much to take in, but if you want to know more about SEO please contact me, or read one of my SEO guides. Things like flash, too much script coding (often found in templates) will put you behind your competitors when it comes to search engine ranking.

Step 2 How to promote my website