Building A Website

- Before You Begin

When you do something, it helps to do it the right way from the start. It takes less time, effort, and money to start from solid foundations. So, before building a website, think about your ultimate goal:

• what do you want to achieve?
• what resources do you have in creating the website? Time? Financial? Skill level?
• what are your plans in launching , maintaining, and updating it, given the tide of time and changing business scenarios?
• How big a site do you want to create, and what resources do you need to accomodate future growth?
• What sort of things do you want to add in later? Newsletter? Shopping cart?

Some of us start building a website without clear planning, only to wonder why there is no traffic, or visitors don't convert into sales or revenue. Remember, creating an unsuccessful website is as costly and time consuming as is creating an attractive website which attracts visitors, is easy to navigate, and is tailored to our target audience.

When planning a website, find the right subject for it first. If you have a broad idea for a site, do some keyword research to find the niches, the more specialized subjects, or audience, within that broad topic. It's possible usually to find less competitive niches even within competitive, broad industries. And by targeting the subject of the site, it's easier to build a website that will appeal to your visitors.

Choose a keyword from a list of keywords that will attract the type of customer to your site that matches your business. Wordtracker is an excellent resource for finding niches within broad topics, and seeing how much demand and competition a particular phrase has. Keyword Results Analyzer is extremely helpful for organizing the data and sorting through it.

Research your niche. Read magazines, both consumer and trade magazines, to get an idea of how your potential customers think, and how other businesses are communicationg with them. Industry magazines and journals are a great way to keep abreast of developments in your chosen field, and can provide a way of presenting your customers with up to date information. Remember, people go online to find information, and even if you're selling something, the website you are building should satisfy some of that need. It creates credibility, and helps build that all important relationship with your visitors.

The content of the website is very important. The information should be concise, brief and to the point,. It should be easily understood, and written in a way that takes into account the differences in reading on a computer to reading a book or magazine. It should satisfy the visitor, by having relevant, meaningful information that adds value to a visitor's experience, and answers questions they may have when they searched and found your site.

Keywords are a great way to guage what people are interested in finding information on, and when building a site, keep each page focused on a main keyword phrase and it's related secondary phrases. This helps both visitors and the search engines.

The layout of the website structure should be easy to navigate. If people can't find what they are looking for, they won't stick around long. A site should not have distracting and tacky flashing objects, or be littered with banner ads. Make the navigation logical, and provide a sitemap so visitors can tell what a site is about at a glance. A sitemap also helps the search engines navigate all of the pages of your site.

Finally, remember that a website should help the visitor solve his/her problems. You don't have to give away everything, perhaps keeping some things aside for a newsletter or ebook, or ecourse. But you need to provide good, valuable information.

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• RSS Feed Secrets Part 2
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