A Web Site is a collection of web pages that are related and organized in some way. The better the content and the better the organization of that content, the better the web site.
Planning
There are some technical things to consider when planning a web site. If your target audience is likely to be very high tech, or you have a relatively captive audience such as an Intranet, you can plan to add more bells and whistles to your site. These might include lots of graphics, animation, sound and video.
If you are trying to appeal to the mass market, you might consider doing without some of the graphics, animations, etc. in order to minimize the time it takes for your web pages to load. Many users will get impatient and leave your site after only a few seconds if they feel like nothing is happening.
Web sites roughly divide into these categories:
- Personal - sites mostly about the people who create them, including hobbies, family members, poetry or photography, and favorite links.
- Brochures - sites that tell all about a businesses or organization's benefits and features, including contact, service, product and ordering information.
- Communication - these sites include bulletin boards, chat rooms, etc.
- E-commerce - sites that have products to sell including retailers, auctions, wholesalers, etc.
- Entertainment - sites whose main objective is to entertain you, including adult content web sites.
- Information - sites about a particular subject, offering lots of information and links to other sites.Wikipedia is an excellent example of an information website.
- Portals - sites whose primary function is to link you to other sites. This generally includes search engines and directories. Portals such as Excite often offer news services and other features that you can personalize, such as the scores of your favorite sports team, or stock prices.
If you are planning on having products to sell, then you need to look for Web Hosting Services with e-commerce options such as large server space, shopping carts and other special programming capabilities, as well as merchant accounts for processing credit card payments.
Information sites are usually less complex and do not require e-commerce options or large amounts of server space. Some very large information sites will use databases and .php (all purpose server side scripting program), .asp (Active Server Pages - used on Miscrosoft servers) or .jsp (Java Server Pages - used on UNIX servers) to help deliver vast amounts of information. Java and JavaScript are client side programming languages that can be used to implement more complex features or graphical presentations.
Here are some great reports on setting up and promoting a web site.
The basic procedure for building a web site is:
- Find or create the content for the site
- Organize the content for your site
- Create the pages for the site
- Find a web hosting server
- Choose a Domain Name
- Upload, update and maintain the site
- Promote the site
Find or create the content for the site
You will need to assemble all the content for your site before actually creating the site. This includes writing all the text describing your business, products or organization (including an overview for the main page, specific product descriptions, information or articles, order forms, etc.) ; finding graphics that illustrate those products or ideas (including logos, photos, drawings, illustrations, brochures, etc.); organizing other elements that you want to include (including sounds, videos, animations, etc.).
You may want to hire a writer or editor to help with the creation or polishing of the text. Graphics will have to be scanned or created by a graphic artist and then converted into gifs or jpegs. Sounds, videos and animations must be converted into an appropriate format for the web.