Steps to Building a Website

Getting the correct building blocks in place will not only save you time in the long run, but will help to get your site get better placed in search engines which means more traffic and visitors.

What do You Want from Your Site?

Before taking any steps to building a website you need to think what you want from your site, by this I mean, is it going to be a hobby type of website or a business?

If you’re creating a hobby site then you can choose a free service such as Blogger or Squidoo, but if you want to create a revenue generating web site or a complete business, and most people like the idea of earning a full or part-time income from the internet then your best option is to use hosting company where you actually own the website and domain name.

Type of Site Niche’s

Many times we get asked; what is the best subject to create a website around?

The answer to this is, there is no best subject, the best advice I can give is create a website around something you are an expert in or have a passion about.

By taking these steps to building a website you will enjoy what you are writing about, and this will be reflected in your content/web pages.

Once you have decided on your particular niche make sure your chosen subject is not too competitive, for example if we have a big interest in cars, this would very a very broad and competitive market, but if we drill this down and then select something such as a particular car part or type of car accessory.

When you have decided on your chosen niche you now need to see how popular it is going to be, after all there is no point in creating a website that has a very small following for its subject.

Go to - google keyword tool type in the subject of your niche and you will be able to see how popular it is with visitors and how competitive it is with other websites, don’t become too number bound here, but if you enter into a competitive market that’s ok if you are passionate about what you believe in, it may just take a little longer to get ranked well.

Website Type – Static or Dynamic

In case you’re not aware a static website is where each page is manually created and is stored as a complete page.

A dynamic website usually has a database running behind it; this is where it stores all the content for the pages, if someone visits the site the required information is then retrieved from the database and a webpage is automatically created using a template.

To a certain degree static websites are considered to be a little old hat now, but they can still serve their purpose, and have advantages and disadvantages, such as if you want to update an element on the site and you wanted the change to be on every page, you will need to update every page unless your using CSS, if on the other hand you have a dynamic site and the template for the site is a single page you only need to update the single page.

One main advantage of setting up a static site is the cost as you only need to have hosting space and a domain name

For a dynamic website you will need hosting space, a domain name and a database usually MySql.

Just about any hosting company worth its salt should be able to provide all of this for around $7 per month.

Don’t be put off by dynamic websites, they may initially be more complicated but there are lots of free packages around such as Word Press that make installing a dynamic site very easy.

Domain Name

The domain name should never be taken lightly, many people don’t realise how much extra weight a good domain name gives a website.

When thinking of a domain
Make sure the name of the domain means the subject of the site, for example a site which deals with model cars would mean nothing if it was called jons-cars.com, but if it was called scale-model-cars.com it would be concise and to the point.

Try to use the minimum amount of words, try not to go above 3, you can use hyphens if needed.

Try to get a .com address, there are lots of lesser ones available which can be used such as .org or .co.uk, but .com is the best choice if possible.

Site Structure

The sites structure is a big thing, if your site has too many levels visitors and search engines may never find all your pages, I have found it best to have 3 tiers

The home page tier 1

Pages under this which can be accessed from the home page tier 2

And all other pages which can be access from the tier 2 pages

Creating Site – SEO

Steps to building a website that is successful must include SEO or Search Engine Optimization, SEO is a way of telling search engines how important your site is and what it is about.

I’m not going into too much detail here as SEO is a big subject in itself, but to begin with your website will need.

A fair spread of keywords throughout each article you write.

H1, Metatags and Keywords added you each page
A Sitemap so Google, Yahoo and MSN can quickly see when you add new content.

Get links from other websites to yours; this will make your website more important in the eyes of search engines. Learn about reciprocal linking and run a campaign for this.

More steps  to building a website the Do’s & Dont’s

Do not link you websites that offer nothing, but ads, this will only damage your websites reputation.

It’s all very well to add advertising to your website, some sites do very well from this, but don’t plaster it everywhere or your site will get tagged as offering nothing, but advertising.

Try to make articles on your site 400-800 words, less than 400 and they don’t hold a lot of weight in terms of keywords, but more than 800 is just a waste, if you create a page with 1400 words consider breaking it into two articles.

Steps to building a website as a blog - find out how easy it can be to build a professional blog type website

The above article reflects my own opinion of steps to building a website that I follow

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