Getting Started

Make Sure You Can Answer These Questions

What is the business objective of the web site?
Who is my intended audience?
How fast is their connection speed?
What type of client are they likely to be using?
Who are my competitors and what is their web presence?
Are there complimentary websites (portals, associations, etc.) I can use to leverage my site?
What type of marketing should I use to make sure the site is successful?
How will I track the success of my site?

Follow These Simple Steps to Create your Website

Select and register a domain name (URL) that reflects what your company does, is relatively short, easy to remember and easy to spell.
To find out WHO a current domain is owned by click here.
Select a company to host your site. Use a local company for hosting that has several routes (redundancy) to the Internet backbone. DNS has partnered with www.cyberlynk.net to provide quality hosting services at a very reasonable price. For a complete list of ISP's checkout The List or ISP Check.
Research competitive and affiliate sites.
Create and organize your content into 7 to 10 categories. This often translates into an inverse organization chart (top level is type of product or service). Create sub-categories as needed. Each section should be no longer than a normal page.
Identify existing sites which can be used as a reference point to develop your site in terms of functionality, navigation, color and aesthetics. A great site that showcases top sites by category is www.webbies.com
Design your site. Use server-side scripting whenever possible to avoid potential client rendering issues.
Test the site on as many different clients as possible.

Colors

Defining your primary webite colors is important. You should have a maximum of 4 primary colors. There are only 216 colors that can be safely used on the web (universal-color palette). If you have the luxury of selecting your colors from scratch you may want to visit www.paletteman.com where you can assemble a color scheme interactively.

Content Rules

Above all other things content is what will attract visitors to your site. You must provide information that is well organized, accurate and concise.

Ease of Use

Users read from top to bottom, left to right. Most users will not scroll down and virtually no users will scroll to the right. Navigation of the site must be intuitive and fast. Generally speaking users prefer navigation on the top or lefthand side of the browser. If you decide to use images (rollovers) for navigation make sure you also provide text based navigation. No page should take longer than 7 seconds to load.

Use appropriate keywords in <META> tag (used by search engines spiders and bots) to identify your site. Register your site with popular search engines:

Instead of signing up separately with each search engine you can use one of several online companies to do the work for you:

Keep 'em Coming Back (Persistent or Sticky Eyeballs)

If your site does not change or provide new content users will not come back. You should provide fresh content and make it easy for the user to find. Many sites have a "What's New" section or change content on the main page of the site frequently.