Your First Web Site

By David Dunlap

How you approach your first web site greatly depends on what your web site is for. If you are web site is of a personal nature you have the ability to play around with the tools at your disposal. If it is for business however, you have a variety of skills you either need to quickly master or find people who have mastered them and make them do it.

Personal Web Sites

Personal web sites offer up a means to sample the experience of building a web site from the bottom up. Be it blog, game guild, gallery, portfolio, resume, or just some site you decided to throw together, personal sites give you the ability to ease into the hosting experience. One of the first things you might want to do is get acquainted with the tools you have at your disposal.

Spend a little time each week developing some aspect about it. Your personal web site doesn't have to be just a blog or just a photo gallery, instead you can add a variety of components and integrations to it to make it more appealing. Here are just a sample of things you can do or add to your personal site:

1. A family blog or newsletter
2. A password protected portion, which contains a day planner links to your Google Calendar, backup of your address book, etc.
3. Connect it to your social networking sites.
4. Add a family recipe section.
5. Use it to store links and bookmarks to things you like.
6. Build an RSS aggregator to grab all of your favorite news items from around the web.
7. Add your resume or portfolio.
8. Experiment with the look and feel. Check out side scrolling web sites, or sites with unique parts and try making your own unique components.
9. Have you been asked the same questions over and over again? Build your own FAQ and the next time someone asks you the same old questions tell them to go look it up.

Personal web sites can be rewarding and challenging. As with most things in life, you get what you put in. Having a personal site can be just another household chore or it could be a fun experience that allows you to leave your own personal stamp on the Internet. Which will you choose?

Business Web Sites

If your first web site is a business site that needed to be designed yesterday than you are in for a very bumpy journey. It is recommended that you start with some form of content management system (CMS), preferably one that can hook directly into, or already has some form of shopping cart software (if the site is a corporate site and not intended to sell products than disregard the shopping cart). A good CMS is designed to elevate a great deal of the maintenance involved with running a web site. CMS like Joomla and Drupal use plugins and modules to help control various aspects of your site. Once you have the base part down here is what you will need to learn or do:

1. Have all of your marketing material ready ahead of time. Your copy should be concise and to the point.
2. You will need to learn search engine optimization and marketing.
3. You will need to learn basic fundamentals of art design and composition (especially with regards to page and layout).
4. You will need to understand the ins and outs of intuitive site navigation.
5. You will need to understand how to write content that reflects your search engine knowledge (see point 2).
6. You will need to be able to invest time in producing content on a timely basis.
7. You should have minor knowledge in Internet law and have a lawyer on call (this is a precautionary move, but can help if you ever get a security breach, run into copyright law, etc.)
8. You need to understand how best to secure your web site, the server it is one (if it is within your sphere of influence), and any connections you make to the sensitive material on the backend.

Granted this is a lot of things to learn, and you could go at it without any of this knowledge, but your site would be handicapped. More so if your competition has had web sites up and running for some time. The alternative of course would be to hire one or more employees or consultants to do the work for you. Some it might not require a full time employee, but case by case work.

The unfortunate part is there is no one size fits all. If you have browsed other tutorials on the matter of web development you will notice a lot of generalities. Although there is some science to building quality web sites there are no definites. What works for some sites and some industries won't work for them or for all companies.

However, one of your baselines should be the web sites of your competitors. Do they look pleasing to your eye? Can you navigate them easily? Do they rank well in search engines? More importantly, what can you improve on them for your own site?

Business web sites can be a headache from the sheer amount of things you need to learn, control, design, and build. However, there is no other way to reach the entire world from one point. For its sheer ability to reach the masses, isn't it worth taking time to thoroughly learn?

About the author, David Dunlap  -  

David is a prolific author of countless articles, blogs, commentaries, white papers, and reviews for well over a decade. Having written for newspapers, print and online magazines in topics ranging from marketing to business economics to search engine optimization and web design, David presented the qualifications necessary to become the Editor in Chief of Web Host Magazine & Buyer's Guide, the Hosting Authority. David uses both his unique analytical skills and indelible wit to ensure that Web Host Magazine remains a source for web host information while remaining light and entertaining.

Along with his active journalism career, he has supplied marketing and SEO consulting for companies both inside and outside of the Web Host industry.

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