Building A Website – A Basic Introduction For Beginners
If you’re interested in building a website for business, for making money online, or for your own personal use, then this basic introduction to website building will help you understand the process and the steps involved.
To begin with, you should understand the main differences between website design, building a website, and web site marketing.
Website Design or Web Design is essentially the process of creating the graphic elements and design layouts for your website. Web design generally requires using programs like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Flash, etc … as these tools are required to create static or animated elements that get incorporated in the design of your site.
Website Building takes web design to the next stage by including aspects of website construction such as planning how you will integrate the aesthetic components of your web site (e.g. themes, images, colors, fonts, text layout, etc.), with its functional elements (e.g. page navigation, content structure, interactive website features, etc.), registering a domain name, setting up a webhosting account for your website and taking the website development process all the way from concept to reality. In other words, after designing and building your website, you should have a real live website that people can visit by typing your domain name into their internet browser.
The last stage of this process is to then make your website visible online to people who are interested in what you have to offer. This area includes search engine optimization (SEO), internet marketing, traffic generation, link-building and so on.
For the purpose of this article, let’s focus on the process of building a website only and the essential steps you need to follow to ensure that you end up with a solid, professional quality website that serves whatever purpose you have envisioned for it. Building a website step by step in a logical order is the key to having a successful online presence.
The first step to getting a website built is not designing the site, but determining whether there is an actual demand for your market. In other words, “if you build it, will they come”? This is where investing a little time and effort in doing market research can pay off handsomely later on. One important aspect of market research when it comes to building a website is doing proper keyword research. This means identifying what the main keywords and keyword phrases you will build your website’s content around are, then analyzing these keywords for answers to questions like: how many people are searching for these keywords, how much competition is there for these words, how easy will it be to dominate my market online (i.e. in the search engines, social networks, etc …) and so on.
Think about it logically. Building a website for your business, organization or for your own personal use represents a considerable investment of time, effort and money. Wouldn’t you rather know before you go ahead and make this investment, what your best options for having a successful website are?
Once you have done your initial market research and satisfied yourself that there is indeed a viable market demand for your information and that you can compete online in this market, the next step is to then do website planning. Begin by working towards arriving at a very clear understanding of what the purpose of your website will be. If you are planning to build a website for your business, do you simply want to let customers know a little bit about your products and services? Do you want them to be able to order online? If so, will you be selling a single product or service, or do you need an e-commerce store with a shopping cart for ordering multiple items? The answer to these questions will affect many aspects of your website construction and development decisions, as well as influence website costs and future online marketing strategies.
Only after doing the preliminary work described above and arriving at a clear picture of what the purpose of your web site will be and what goals it will help you achieve, should you then start building a website.
Now, keep in mind the fact that everything you need to do when it comes to building a website can be done by professionals, but this will all come at a price. If you have the money to spend on outsourcing your website building to a professional website builder or a web development company, then go ahead, but be clear about what you want them to build for you. Often, a web building company will try to sell you a website that focuses more on aesthetics (how your site looks) than functionality (how your site works). Some of the reasons for this are:
- The website company may use a template-based system for building a website that saves them time and keeps your costs down, but the templates may not be optimized for your specific purpose.
- The website company may want to sell you a flashier, more impressive and more expensive looking website than what you really need.
- The website company may have a stronger pull towards website design rather than internet marketing. As stated earlier, web designers generally focus more on the appearance of your website than on your website’s performance and results.
Until you’ve invested some time and effort promoting your website online, you won’t really know how well your website performs, but how your website looks creates an immediate impression on you as a website buyer. Most web service providers make their money on delivery of a finished web site, not on the site’s long term results, so it’s not surprising to think that you may end up spending more money than you need to and will end up getting a website that does not perform as well as you would like it to when you pay someone else to build your web site for you.
Wherever possible, therefore, I would recommend you consider building your own website. Of course, this does require learning how to build a website as well as learning how to use a website building tool like an HTML editor or website building software.
If you want to build a professional website that will end up looking and performing exactly the way you want it to while saving yourself money on web development costs, then you may want to look into a comprehensive and affordable online training course that takes you step-by-step through the entire process of planning, designing and building
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