How to Design a Website For Success

Website design has come a long way in the last few years. In the not so distant past, you needed to spend thousands of dollars to build and maintain a professional looking website. Nowadays, you have the option of building a website yourself, using a pre-built template, or hiring a professional web designer.

Of the three, the best choice is to build a website yourself. You could spend thousands of dollars for a professionally designed website and still not have it meet your needs. Plus, every time you want to make a change to your site, no matter how small, you will be dependent on someone else to do so and will need to wait until that person is available. Since you will not be the only client, it could be weeks before your web designer is available to make any changes to your website. Using a template is easy and fast but you're limited to its built in features. If you design your site yourself, you can have exactly what you want where you want it. You can make any changes, no matter how small or large, any time you want.

In order to protect your intellectual property, including your website and the products that you have developed, you may want to register the copyright. Although your website and products are copyrighted as soon as you create them, it will be difficult to enforce your rights unless you actually register your copyright.

The charge for copyrighting your website or product varies. Currently, there is a registration fee payable to the "Register of Copyrights" as well as the fee charged by the service that you choose to handle the paper work. (The service that you choose might include all of the fees in one package price.)

There are several options available for registering a domain name. The best option is to choose a domain name and pay for registration. The cost for registration varies from under $10 to $50 or more per year. While the higher fee gives you more options, the added benefits are usually not worth the expense.

Some hosting services offer free domain registration, usually if you pay for at least 1 year of web hosting in advance. If you choose this option, be sure that you can purchase the domain name just in case you decide to change hosting services.

If you are building a website for personal use, you probably don't need a domain name as you can use a free hosting service that may provide you with a URL.

However, if your website is a business website, you will definitely need to choose and register a domain name as using a free domain name looks very unprofessional. Since you need to gain the trust of your visitors in order to turn them into customers, anything that looks unprofessional should be avoided.

In order to have a web presence, you will need to subscribe to a hosting service. While free hosting is available, you will not want to use a free hosting service for a business website as this will look very unprofessional to your prospects. Again, it will be very hard to win your prospect's trust if they view you as being unprofessional. As you can find cheap web hosting nowadays, there should be no reason for you to use a free hosting service.

Usability is the most important factor in the success of a website. A bad design can cost a website up to 40% of repeat traffic while a good design can increase the number of repeat visits by that same 40%.

Approximately 8% of all Internet users have some form of disability, primarily visual. Since most websites are not designed with accessibility in mind, these users are limited in the number of sites they are capable of visiting.

There are many options for the "do-it-yourself" web designer. You can download free website builders, use on-line website builders, use a text editor such as Notepad, an HTML editor, or a word processor (not recommended) which lets you save with an .html extension. You can also use a ready-made template where you only need to add your HTML ready web copy and images as well as your links and your website is built.

There are two types of website builders: HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors. HTML editors require you to learn some HTML code while WYSIWYG editors require little or no coding knowledge.

However, no matter how much you rely on a program that does almost everything for you, you should learn some basic HTML codes so that you're able to fine tune your web pages and change any features you don't like. I recommend that you use a text editor such as Notepad from the beginning and code your website by hand. If you code by hand, you will have control over every teeny, tiny detail of your website. Once you learn the basic HTML tags, you'll find that coding your websites by hand is easier than fighting with software to get your website to display exactly as you want.

One of the easiest options for beginners is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor which is similar to a word processing program and is very easy to use. However, these editors should really be called What You See Is ALMOST What You Get editors as many times these type of editors will display your code almost, but not quite, the way you wish. They also do not generate efficient HTML and CSS codes so you may need to change and/or delete some of the coding.

Using an HTML editor is probably second best as you'll only need to learn some basic HTML codes and editing the code is very simple. Be aware that HTML editors often write "dirty code", extra code that is not really needed to display your web page correctly. To cut down on the time it takes for your web page to load, you will need to delete these extra codes. You'll need to know what codes can be safely deleted which, of course, means that you will need to know something about HTML codes. Also, HTML editors do not recognize or write all codes so you may need to manually add codes for certain features that you wish to have on your website. The best HTML editor is Dreamweaver though it is pricey.

You will need to learn HTML coding if you use a text editor such as Notepad. This is because you will need to actually write the HTML tags for your web pages.

It is NOT recommended that you use a word processing program such as MSWord® as it adds extra characters which may make your web page display incorrectly. (If you do use a word processing program, you must use one that allows you to save in .html or .htm extensions.)

To ensure uniformity throughout your site, you will want to use the same template for every page of your website. You can create a template using either an HTML editor or a text editor such as Notepad or you can use a pre-built template that you have purchased or downloaded for free.

Also available are on-line website builders which are usually included in a package deal. The package often includes the website builder, hosting, email accounts, and other features for a single monthly fee.

Here are some advantages to using an on-line website builder:

1. Everything is provided by one company;

2. The website builder is usually a WYSIWYG editor, no special skills are required to use the editor, and you don't need to learn any code.

However, on-line website builders are not recommended for several reasons:

1. You don't have direct access to the code;

2. The templates are limited in number;

3. If the host goes down, you can permanently lose your data (if the site was not properly backed up);

4. If your site gets hijacked, you'll lose all of your files.

Overall, most people find that the disadvantages of using an on-line website builder far outweigh the advantages. The instructions provided by the hosting service are usually adequate.

Whatever method you decide on, designing and building a website is only a small part of creating a successful site. Among other things, you will need to decide on the content for your site, choose the appropriate keywords for your content, and decide on how you will promote your site once it is built. Your will need to undertake some research and above all, you will need PATIENCE. The easiest part will be the actual construction of your web pages.

Donna L. Walsh is a recognized author of many web design and development articles and ebooks. Subscribe to Donna's DWWD Newsletter & instantly download "How To Build A Money Making Website - A Resource Directory", a $97 value at absolutely no charge. Visit: http://DWWDNewsletter.com

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