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The Website That Jack Has Built |
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When thinking of creating a web site for your business, once you understand the need of one, you are faced with numerous choices - what kind of site you want - dynamic or static, with lots of graphics or lots of text, animated or not.
Choosing the right type of web site is important for your business. If you sell goods online the choice is pretty obvious, but what if you run models agency, consulting business or a restaurant? What kind of pages do you need in this case?
First you need to dive a little into marketing and understand what kind of audience you are serving. If you are running a fancy restaurant you probably want fancy web site that make visitors feel like they are home. This way they will be attracted to visit your real-world establishment and the web site will serve it's purpose. You can post updated menus and announce special events happening at your web site but it's not crucial to update your site every 15 minutes with latest news. On the other hand, if you running online store you probably want to post your new inventory as soon as possible so that people start ordering while you still unloading your trucks.
So there's a good chance that you may be taken by all the fuzz about new technologies but there may simply be no need to spend time, money and effort on building a web site that won't deliver. As an example - one of my former colleagues likes to build everything with the latest technology, so he got a Java-powered web site that utilized plenty of Java code, in overall very slow and simply doesn't work on 30% of computers because their owners don't have Java runtime installed. Since you want your site to be visible to as many visitors as possible, you want to avoid such mistakes.
Your first choice for a home page or simple resume web site (unless you're computer artist or web developer - then it's slightly different story) is plain HTML site. You can use one of many available HTML editors, templates or even online web site building tools and aides. Such web site will be very easy to manage, change and host. Since you can put HTML pages almost on any free or paid hosting, you can ask your internet provider - most likely they have something to offer., so it won't come at additional price.
A word of advise here is to put this site's address in your signature so next time when you send e-mails to friends and relatives they will know that you've got your very own web site and where to look up those pictures from your last vacation.
Next step would be to have some sort of dynamic site. The dynamic site is one that changes in response to visitor's input. For example, when browsing online store the visitor has a choice to filter products by price, tossing products in and out of shopping cart or posting messages in a forum - that's exactly what dynamic sites are all about. On the internet you can see a huge variety of dynamic web sites - from simple forms that act as a replacement of the e-mail address to e-commerce portals like Amazon.com and Yahoo.
If you decide to go this route it's about time you pick a book on one of many web site programming languages - unless you already know some - and start mastering your skills. Most web hosting services will provide you with ability to host PHP, Perl or ASP scripts. There are providers that allow JavaBeans, Java Servlets and Java Server Pages, combinations of some or all of the above. So pick the technology you most familiar with or just lean towards to and start away.
As always search engine's your friend when you need some specific piece of code, answer to a specific question or a problem. If you need help with one of the aforementioned languages it's very easy to find respective web site, luckily they are called Perl.com, PHP.net and ASP.net. The latter resource provides the information on latest Microsoft's development - ASP.NET, the older version of ASP (sometimes referred to as ASP 2.0) is still around, but you probably don't want to spend your time on proprietary technology that's already rendered obsolete. Don't hesitate to use pre-made scripts, they usually been around for a while, have at least most of the worrisome bugs fixed and you can obtain limited support even if the script is free. Also, if you're un-familiar with technology, it's a good hands-on experience to take someone else's script and tweak it to suit your needs. Just watch those copyrights, since most of the scripts are distributed under GPL license, make sure you obey the rules. It's not really that high of a price, really.
Depending on your needs for a web site you may well be off with some pre-made tweaked script, like in case of forum software there are at least three available free (under GPL license) options that perform perfectly even under a very heavy loads. If your web site needs more than that you probably should think of ordering custom-made script for you, since that will address your specific needs and purpose of the web site. Although free option will always sound very appealing, sometimes it's cheaper to pay a price.
Next level - at least in time and effort if not the price - would be a web site built using popular Flash technology. The advantages are almost endless - very high level of interactivity, ability to use movie- and cartoon-like animation, easy programming language and development environment, no server side technology required, plenty of tutorials and aides. The drawbacks - it's very proprietary, sites built around Flash technology tend to be slower if compared to more traditional static/dynamic pages and they usually cost more to develop and maintain. So, unless you're utterly familiar with Flash technologies, you probably will want to order such web site from web design studio. Besides obvious reasons for complex web site being built by professional artists and developers, they have experience of building similar web sites and may suggest some of the features for your web site you may have overlooked. After all, they're professionals and you're paying them to work on your site, so why don't use your money wisely and to the full extent.
Whether you have decided to pick a hands-on approach and started building your web site on your own, ordered your very fancy flash site from famous web studio or went for one of the already available software packages - you should also think about the name of your site. In fact - once you get a crystal clear view on the idea you trying to bring to life, you should already be thinking about the web site's name and domain name. With most of the english words as domain names already taken in the early days of Internet, you have several options to go for.
First, and foremost - try to come up with your own original name. As an example take a look at Google and Yahoo - these are the words that have never existed in English language before the Internet era, now we either ‘go yahoo' or ‘google it'. If you ran out of ideas - try Google Answers, a service where you can ask questions similar to "I sell cabbages online, what should be the name of my web site?" and for a very reasonable fee (usually around 30 - 50 dollars) get plenty of answers to choose from. There's also some sort of suggestion tools that provide you with suggested web site names if the one you want is already taken. Godaddy.com has it and there's also a very interesting web site called NameBoy.com, both doing pretty decent job of suggesting domain names.
Second option - browse directories of deleted domains and try to pick one that correlates with your business. The hidden advantage here is that since this name already existed chances are that it will already be listed in search engines and online catalogs therefore will bring you some unexpected customers. It's very time consuming as every day literally thousands of domain name are being decomissioned, but occasionally you may stumble on a marvellous gem, like SITCOMTV.COM
Third option - the most expensive one - is to buy domain name from a previous owner. You may visit numerous domain name auctions, or try to contact the owner directly. Depending on the popularity of the words and abbreviations that domain name contains the price may range from dollars to tens of thousands of dollars. Depending on your budget this may or may not be a good choice, but the quality of domains in this case will be higher (more recognizable and memorizable names), but, ofcourse, for a higher price.
Once you picked right tools and right name for your web site, develop it and put it on the web - don't forget that leaving it like it is usually is not a good idea. Search engines crawl web sites every day, rearranging their order in search results, hundreds of new sites are being added every hour. You need to put additional effort on staying ahead of the competition, so update your web site as often as possible, make sure it has no broken links and is easy to read. Given that your products or services are better then your competition's build a trust with your web site visitors and they wll be many happy returns. And what could be better than a returning customer? Only the one who brings his friends along.
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