Design Your Own Web Site

You can create a better web site for less money than a professional web site designer can! Think about it. You know your business plan better than a web site designer and you know your marketing plan better than a web site designer, so why would your want a web site designer to advertise and promote your business.

Designing your own web site doesn't mean learning HTML. Just use whatever word processor that you feel comfortable with, follow the design steps outlined below, and then let a web site designer convert your concepts and designs into the proper Internet languages.

All too often business owners can't wait to get on line. They are not willing to take the time necessary to properly publish their web site. Many designers will take advantage of this situation by claiming that they can handle the entire process for them. Just remember what we have already discussed on this page. How many web site designers understand your business well enough to advertise and promote what you do? The answer is obvious; you have to do a lot of the work yourself. You may need to hire a designer to convert your ideas into HTML and submit your site to the search engines, but YOU have to plan it and YOU have to promote it.

The remainder of this page will function like an on-line tutorial that will help you to create your own web site. Make sure you read this entire page before you start. The creation of your web site will follow 7 basic phases: Planning, Creating, Checking, Submitting, Positioning, Promoting, and Maintaining. Even if you decide to hire a web site professional to handle most of these phases, the planning and promotion of your site are thing that you should seriously consider doing yourself. To function properly, your web site should be an integrated part of your overall business strategy.

Excuse us for a quick word of self-serving promotion. BitWare Solutions is available to help you with your web site project. OK, enough of that stuff for this page; let's get back to the FREE advice!

Planning

The key to any successful project is planning. Even if you eventually hire a web site designer to create your site, you should still make at least an attempt to do some or most of the initial planning yourself. Here are a few key points to consider when planning your web site:

1. Take your time. A good web site takes days, weeks or even months to plan. Bad sites can be planned in considerably less time!
2. Content is king. Customers don't turn on their television sets or listen to their radios just to hear the commercials. Your web site should be at least 80% information and 20% sales. Concentrate on how to draw potential customers to your site and keep them there. Make a list of free things you can offer your customers.
3. Role reversal. The best way to start the design process is to think of your business from your customer's point of view. Create a list of key words and short phrases that people would use to describe your business. This list will become very important in other design steps.
4. Take a site seeing trip. Use the list you just created to search for yourself using several Internet search engines. Of course you won't find your site, but you will probably find some of your competitors.
5. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Make another list for the web sites that you find that impress you, and also the ones that turn you off. Pay close attention to the sites that appear on the first page returned by each search engine.
6. Expand your lists. As you surf the web, keep your lists near by. Look for other keywords for your search list. Look for the businesses that present themselves in a professional manner, and always keep in mind the free information you can offer your customers.
7. Organize Your Ideas. Your web site should not be just one long run-on page. Arrange your ideas into logical groups for each page.
8. Take the day off. After a few hours you are probably hopelessly locked into a single focused thought pattern. Get away for a while. Start again tomorrow with a fresh perspective and an open mind. Keep repeating steps 1 through 7 until you are happy with your ideas. This step is one of the primary reasons it takes so long to develop a good web site. If you don't want a good site, just skip this step and move on to the next section.

Creating

After careful planning, you should have developed some good ideas for what each page of your web site should include. Use your word processor to write the content for each of your web pages. If you wish to continue on with this "do it yourself" approach, our feedback page contains a number of good links for on line HTML resources, or you may want to hire a professional designer to help you at this time. Either way, the following key points should be considered as you convert your ideas into Internet languages.

1. Develop a Theme. All of your pages should have a consistent appearance. As you develop the theme for your pages, keep the following in mind:
   • Dark backgrounds will often make your pages hard to read and difficult to print.
   • If you use frames, you must develop a parallel site that does not use frames. This could nearly double your development time.
   • Avoid blinking text and animated graphics wherever possible. They do nothing but pull your customer's attention away from the message you are trying to convey.
   • Write everything down. When you add to your site a month or two down the road, you will need to know the fonts you used in your graphics and the tools you used for special effects.
2. Home Page. Chances are that your customer arrived at your home page from a list of 20 or so competitors that was displayed by a search engine. I hate to use old cliches, but you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
   • A lot of visitors don't even wait for the first page to load, when they don't see anything useful in 10 or 20 seconds, they just go away.
   • I've seen figures indicating that click-throughs from the first page of a site to deeper levels can range as low as 35-45%.
   • Limit the size of your home page. Although 28.8 and 33.6 K modems are perhaps the most popular connections, and 56 K is moving up, many customers still have 14.4 connections.
   • Your home page should be short, your message should appear to snap on the screen, and the message must be strong and precise.
   • A good home page lets the reader know immediately what the site is about.
   • Don't try to describe everything on one page.
3. Graphics -- Graphics should be used to decorate your pages, not dominate them
   • Make them only as big as they need to be. When you reduce the dimensions by 10% you reduce the file size by 19%.
   • Try to re-use the same images on multiple pages.
   • Reduce the colors.
   • Specify the height and width for all your images.
   • Use ALT tags for all your images.
4. Navigate -- build empty navigation framework
   • Minimize clicks to useful material.
   • Navigation should appear on every page. Don't force your visitors to return to your home page each time or they will soon loose interest in your site.
5. Test your design
   • Most surfers do not keep pace as quickly as the technologies seem to advance.
   • At a minimum, test your site with the current and previous versions of Explorer and Navigator.
   • If possible, test your site with other browsers and older version of Explorer and Navigator.

Checking

General

   Spelling and Grammar

Web page creation tools create better HTML code and word processors generally have better grammar and spelling tools, but word processors will impose unwanted changes to the structure of your HTML code. Make copies of your HTML pages, run them through your word processor spelling and grammar checkers, and make parallel changes to the original HTML pages.

   Browser Compatibility

The current and previous versions of Internet Explorer and Navigator usually account for about 90% of the market. The remaining 10% are scattered among older version of these and other browsers. Don't forget to test your pages with graphics turned off.

   Graphics Off

Many customers will surf with graphics off in order to increase display speed. To test your site in this mode, create an empty test directory, copy only your .html files to that directory, then use your browser to open index.html. Is your site still usable?

   Links

Double-check all of your links before you publish your pages.

Display Speed

   Page Size

Make sure that your pages are no larger than 60 K including graphics. This will allow your pages to display quickly on your customers system. If a graphic appears on your home page, you don't have to count it again on other pages.

   Graphic Size

If your pages display too slow, it is probably due to the size of your graphics. A 10% reduction in the size of a graphic will result in a 19% reduction in file size.

   Define Image Sizes

Defining the width and depth of all of your graphics allows your browser to display your pages while the graphics are being downloaded.

Search Engine

   Meta

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="....."> Briefly describe your page or site.

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT=".....">Words you want the search engines to associate with your site.

When defining meta tags, don't forget to include: organization name, common misspellings, plurals, products, product categories, cap variations, location, etc.

   Title

Many search engines use the page title in their search algorithm.

   Image ALT's

Many search engines use alternate image text in their search algorithm.

Submitting

Only the Yahoo directory search engine and the six primary spider search engines bring significant traffic to a site. The addresses of these search engines are:

• Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com)
• Lycos (http://www.lycos.com)
• AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com/)
• Excite (http://www.excite.com)
• HotBot (http://www.hotbot.com/)
• WebCrawler (http://www.webcrawler.com/)
• Infoseek (http://www.infoseek.com/)

Don't forget to look for and list your site on the "Local Search Engines" that serve your community.

Positioning

When a customer searches for a keyword related to your products or services, does your site appear in the top 10 returned by the search engine or does your competition? Submitting your site alone does nothing to insure good visibility.

There are many "search engine spamming" tricks that have been published: unrelated meta codes, white on white text, repeating text, etc. As these techniques are developed, the search engines adjust their site ranking algorithms to ignore them, and sometimes even punish sites for using them. Trying to adjust your site to comply with the search engines is like driving your car with a sunscreen on the front windshield. You can't see how you are driving; you can only use the mirror to see the results.

Positioning companies use special web servers that recognize the IP addresses of the search engine spiders in order to feed them a home page that exactly matches their requirements for high ranking while returning your actual home page to your customers. They track the changes in the search engine algorithms and update your alternate home pages as the search engine requirements change. Positioning companies often charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month to guarantee listing on the first page in the search engine results. This cost is usually outside the budget of many small businesses.

The best way to get a reasonable ranking for your page is to start with the list of key words that your customers will most likely search for. When designing your home page use these words as often as possible in the page text, page title, image alternate text, and meta codes.

Promoting

Promoting your web site does not mean merely listing it on the Internet search engines. Your web address needs to be a part of all of your business advertising. It should appear on all of your printed advertisements. It should be on your business cards. It should be on all of your forms.

Another effective method of promoting your site on line is to search for yourself in the various news groups using dejanews. Join the news groups that apply to your business and answer as many questions as possible. Giving free advice in this manner will establish you as an "expert" in your field.