Planning Your Website

Planning A Website

Every Website regardless of how many pages or how basic its needs, requires some thought and pre-planning. Let’s look at the most fundamental requirements for any website;

• Domain Name: Choose a domain name that either reflects your product, service, business or brand name. Of course shorter, easy to remember domains are the best. .COM is still the most popular but others such .NET, .ORG and Country Code Top Level Domains (ie; .CA, .IN, .COM.AU, CO.UK etc) are gaining popularity very quickly due to the fact that the shorter more attractive domain names under .COM get gobbled up quickly and are hard to find.

• Hosting: Ensure that your Hosting Company gets you the best value for your investment. Most expensive does not equal to the best and the cheapest does not reflect best value. (More On Hosting on another Blog)

• Colours: Choose colours that are pleasant and are web proof. Some colours do not work well on the internet. Stay away from dark backgrounds with dark fonts.

• Fonts: Websites only display a handful of fonts in a web safe format, that is easy to read. Stay away from script or fancy fonts. Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Times Roman are some of the web safe fonts.

• Navigation: A very critical component that many users tend to ignore. Your site must have consistent positioning for your menu selections between all your Webpages. Placing menu selections in different locations between your  pages is a killer for any website. So if it is the left side that you have chosen, then make sure it is in that location for all your webpages.

• Content: I consider this the HEART of any Website. Have your content ready; proofed, authentic, original, spell checked, appropriate to your topic, pleasant to read, thought out, inject humor if you can, concise yet detailed, stay within your subject, provide links to other sites or blogs that may benefit the reader further, be genuine in the information you provide and beyond all be honest.

• Required Pages: No matter the number of pages your site consists of, there are a couple of essential pages every site needs to have. One is the Contact Page. A site without a contact page always makes me worry, I tend to shy away from these sites. I strongly suggest that every e-commerce site should not only have a contact page but also a telephone number. A site selling products that only has a contact form or an email address makes me very nervous to buy from. Of course every site must have a Home Page. A Privacy Page is also a must, especially for online stores, since they collect more then just e-mail addresses. As a matter fact in some countries it is required by law to have one.

The above is just a nutshell. You will note that my blog is stepping you through the process of creating and building your website in a systematic fashion. From time to time there will be detail information on each of the topics as the need and time permit. In the next few weeks I will cover more on the SEO nature of a website.