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Web Site Helps
7 Steps to Developing a Great Web Site
Most companies want a great web site, but very few really know what is necessary to go from idea to online.
Listed below are some of the most important steps that need to be taken to put up a web site.
- Select a domain name. What do you want your www dot com to be and is it available? Thousands of new names are registered every day. There are several companies that a person can use for registering their domain name, but a person needs to be careful that they register their name with a reputable company. Your domain name should be easy to remember, not too long and most important, available.
- Develop ideas for your site. What do you want your web site to do? What will the people who come to your site want from it? A unique design that fits your company's image is important, but you also want visitors to find your site useful. That can mean providing information about ways for them to contact you or information on what your products and services are. It could mean a full-fledged online store for users to purchase products from you or a simple form for them to send you comments. With any project, time spent planning will always be beneficial to the bottom line. A simple task like sketching out what information and images are on each page is very helpful. Design a flow chart to see how your site navigates for the user. When you decide on the person that will develop your site, bring them in on your development meetings.
- Gather your content. One of the most overlooked areas of site development is gathering and submitting content to the developer. For some reason people want a web site done, but don't know what they want to say. They say, "Build me a site" and then they don't provide enough information to fill out the site. Not only copy is needed, but images, graphics and anything else that is included in the site.
- Stay in contact. This should be the responsibility of the developer, but make sure you, as the client, know how things are progressing. Fixing a problem during production is often easier and less costly than after the project is completed. If you don't get updates, ask for them. It's your face that you're displaying to the world; you should be happy with it.
- Make a big launch. Companies spend thousands of dollars on a web site and then wait for visitors to trickle in from word of mouth and eventually search engines. Companies would be well-advised to make the launch of their site a big deal. Send out mailings, email or something to let people know about your site. Your site should now become a standard part of your general business collateral such as business cards, letterhead, brochures and the like, but make the initial launch of your site something special.
- Submit your site to search engines. This step is one that will cause more people grief than anything. Everyone wants to be the number one listing at Yahoo! when their company descriptions are entered, but it doesn't always work that way. Thousands of other companies are competing for that same spot and more are coming out every day. And if you make it number one at AltaVista, you might be number 101 at Google. It may be difficult to know which search engine your potential visitors are using. That is why the previous step of letting people know about your site is so important. META tags, which are keywords about your site, are put into the code to help the search engines know where to place you in the list. Search engine submission has an impact but its impact can be difficult to measure.
- Keep your site fresh. Have you ever been to a site that looks the same today as it did last year? Did you wonder if the information was that old as well? Find ways to continually keep your site new and fresh. Add an article every month, make slight changes to the content or just change an image or two. You don't want your visitors to think they got lost and came to a different site because your site has changed so much, but you always want to have fresh content and information for the user, whether it's their first visit to your site or the 20th. Making changes to your site also keeps you moving in the search engines and that's a very good thing.
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