How Do You Make Your Own Website?
Posted by | Posted in Technology | Posted on 27-01-2010
The more main stream the internet becomes in the business world, the more businesses and individuals want to try and establish an online presence. This brings about tons of questions like “How do you make your own web site?”. So I decided to write a article on the steps you would want to take to establish an online presences and market you and your business to digital stardom.
What route to take for Website design.
Some of the factors you would want to weigh in would be: hiring a web designer,do it yourself and web design software. Those top 3 would be the core questions on whether or not to start your own website or blog. I have consulted many people on which route to take and this is totally up to you and your preferences. If you are a busy person who can’t take the time to do it yourself, you would probably want to hire a web designer. Usually, this could range any where between $150-3000 dollars total depending on what you are wanting. Most sites that have 5 static pages usually go for about $300 to $500 and the ecommerce sites get up to about $3000.00
Outsourcing Pro’s and Con’s – Getting the Job done
One of the better hidden secrets, is places like guru.com and rentacoder.com. These places you can get cheap work done for a low cost;the only problem is sometimes you maybe dealing with someone overseas and the language barrier at times can get frustrating especially if you are trying to explain what you want done. I myself show people who are at least familiar with basic html or understand the lingo to broker a deal how to make money off of this feature in my Recession Busters ebook.
Doing it Yourself – What should I do?
Definitley, the most logical cost saving route would be do it yourself. But, (What should you do?); Not knowing html to the fullest can be detrimental to your business image. The best software I use comes in to different forms. Those would be website design software such as Adobe Dreamweaver,Xsite Pro which is the best for the money. Sometimes the complexity of Dreamweaver can scare people away, there are tons of documentation on how to build and edit with Dreamweaver but, overall it can be overwhelming for a beginner.
Xsite Pro is a pretty neat piece of software for building websites that I was turned on to a while back ago and heavily promote it because of the simplicity and ease. If you can type a word document or email you can pretty much navigate through this software with ease. I recently got XSite Pro 2 and it was pretty easy to figure out. With preloaded templates such as sales pages and even graphical sites for any type of genre or niche business. All you really need to do is type out the information you want on each page.
Xsite Pro also delivers e commerce plug-ins along with site back ups and creates important things such as site maps and Google adsense ads for you once you input the write data and hit publish. Along with both Xsite Pro and Dreamweaver offer it’s own built in FTP (File Transfer protocol) software. These types of software are very helpful when creating websites especially when you are doing static types of pages. That leads us to the next question…
Static or Dynamic?
Static or Dynamic Design, which one is the right one? Well, it can be a hard decision for most especially not know where to begin when making your website. So, what is the difference between the both? Static relates to pages that once they are created have to be manually changed with software or by rewriting the code. This is where software like Xsite Pro or Dreamweaver come into play. Usually, people can edit these with ease with the use of these types of software.
Dynamic can be the way to go especially lately, business getting blogs and setting them up using Blogtactics or other types of tactics to get their page immediately ranks in Google or any other search engines can prove to be Golden. Most web hosting companies like Hostgator or HostDime provide a popular plug-in with one touch installation called Cpanel featuring Fantastico. Once the site is uploaded you can install niche related themes or have someone make some for you at a place like rentacoder.com.
The beautiful thing about dynamic, is you can change your content or add new web pages, you can post changes or updates relatively with ease; once it is setup. Also, it is very resilient and flexible with changes that are made. The most common installations are Wordpress and Joomla. Wordpress is more in the blogging category,(Which is what I use); Joomla is called a content management system and has some pretty decent and flexible features as well but not as user friendly as Wordpress.
Drawing out a plan
When learning to make your own website, you really want to layout a plan or what I like to put on paper basically a site map. Pretend that the web site if a book or short book with pages. Each page, is related to it’s own content whether it be about you type of information or how to contact you. These pages, are interconnected together via a menu and you want to be able to interlink these with some sort of flow.
This flow I like to draw on paper in a tree list format. When you lable one page and what it should be about and show how it will connect to another page and have it all on paper it provide a digital blue print and makes it so much easier when you are designing your first website.
WebSites and Web Pages the Difference
Another misconception I hope I cleared up is the difference between web pages and websites. Sites are made up of many different pages. A lot of people when talking to a designer or talking to others about designing websites tend to mix the two up. So when you are deciding to make your own website, it is my recommendation to use Wordpress for dynamic and Xsite Pro for static sites.
References
Xsitepro 2
Web Hosts that provide Wordpress and Joomla
