The growth of the internet has ushered in the information age. Information is now the most valued commodity and it separates the winners from the losers in the current globalizing world. What better way to provide information than on the internet. So perhaps you need just a simple website for your online grocery shop or just for personal updates. You’ll need to design a website and this site will provide you with the right information for that.
Of course building a website is not rocket science as all the information required is available freely from the internet. Though it may seem a daunting task at first it need not be. You can save yourself a lot of money that you could have used in purchasing expensive software, programming manuals or web server space. In order to design a simple website you need:
- Basic knowledge of computers. Knowledge of a word processor is just enough.
- You should have ready access to a personal computer. This gives you the flexibility to work at any time.
- Access to the internet to enable you upload pages easily and to get the necessary information for your website.
- A HTML editor. This will aid you in the construction of your WebPages. Otherwise you would have needed to know complex web programming languages.
- A web server from where the WebPages can be accessed.
In designing your website you’ll need to follow the following steps clearly.This will aid you in providing the necessary content to your users.
- Have a clear definition of your objectives.i.e what information do you want included in your website.
- Design your WebPages clearly. They should be simple and user friendly with the right graphical design work.
- Of course one of the most important things you’ll need is an html editor. This can be downloaded from the internet for a certain fee. Macromedia dream weaver is among the leading html editors though there are others equally high quality editors.
- The next big step is to construct your website. The website should have the right tone and aesthetic values and be user friendly.
- Next you’ll need to find a suitable web server from where you can upload WebPages. Since a web server might be quite expensive you can rent the services of web hosting companies at a small monthly fee.
- The next step is to upload your WebPages to the web server from where they can viewed by the public. The web server stores your web pages and each time a user clicks on your site it gives him a copy of the web pages.
- The next big step is promoting your website. It is advisable to register your site with search engines. This is among the hardest tasks especially if you want to generate revenue from the site.
It is estimated that only about 2% of websites in the internet generate income. It is particularly hard to keep users coming if you don’t employ creative marketing techniques. You can use search engine optimization which requires that you use certain key words for your website to be ranked high in the search engine.
- The next step is to track the hits to your website to ascertain the number of visitors.
