Should I Have my Own Website and Should I Build it Myself?

Should you have your own website? Lets see! Why do you want to have a website? If creating one would boost sales or promote positive implications to yourself, then by all means, go ahead and do what’s best.

Websites are the in thing these days.  Everyone and their mother has a website, it can be in fashion, sports, or something like that. Websites have become a necessity to almost everyone. Companies, businesses, individuals, even young adults have created personal websites for profit, or for entertainment.

Now that you are determined to build a website, and I knew you would, there are harder considerations to think about. You should be consider several factor before creating a website. These factors are cost, maintenance, use, web host, and driving people to it.

First you should consider the cost. You must always try to find an affordable host which has a very good up time.  It does you no good the have a cheap host if they are down a lot of time. People will become frustrated with your site and just not visit it.  Still you need a to look for a reliability rate. There are a lot of cases where the web hosts has not provided the service they had said they do. Some have even shut down and were nowhere to be seen. Keep this in mind. GoDaddy and 1and1 are two very good host. Do a search for ‘web hosting’ and see what comes up.

Your next consideration is, would hiring a professional be affordable? Is it the best option? For simple websites, you can always look for a free code, or even use a free programs.  You can even modify your free code with your free program.  I like free. If you have read my other blogs on creating a web site you will see I very much into open source.

Now, when it comes to more complex coding, and when you want it to do more than just providing information, hiring help in doing so may be the best way to save time. Not only in terms of design, but security is also a key consideration in assuring a quality website. If the website also acts as a portal for businesses, security would definitely be the issue here.

After you have decides that you need a website and will build it you will need to know how to drive people to it.  Man if I could tell you in one easy paragraph, I would be a genius.  To find that out you will need to look at my web page for Traffic and Search Engine Optimization. I have a great section on it.

This should have provide you with a good place to start.  For more information check out both my website pages and blogs.

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Generating Revenue with Good Planning

For anything to work well, care must be taken to make firm, workable plans to execute it and the same goes for website designs. With a well thought out website design, you will be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you. In fact, many websites turn into online wasteland because they are not well planned and do not get a single visitor. Gradually, the webmaster will not be motivated to update it anymore and it turns into wasted cyberspace.

The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you want to gain any income from the site. Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks. For example, you might have a “food” section, an “accommodation” section and an “entertainment” section for a tourism site. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking for further information.

When you have a broader, better-defined scope of themes for your website, you can sell space on your pages to people interested in advertising on your page. You can also earn from programs like Google’s Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing if people surf to those themed pages and click on the ads. For this very reason, the advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so a themed page fits that criteria perfectly.

As Internet becomes more widespread, advertising on the Internet will bear more results than on magazines or offline media. Hence, start tapping in on this lucrative stream of profit right away!

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5 Important Rules in Website Design

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every small detail to make sure it performs its best to serve its purpose. Here are five important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

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Simple Web Design

In the early days of the Internet, simple Web design was not regarded that highly. It was a real sign of talent to be able to design a complex website that worked. Simple website design was comparatively easy, because computer power was so limited.

In those days the Internet had just enough speed and just enough processing power, so only the real mavericks could make a complex, flashy webpage and have it work.

Nowadays, simple Web design is the end all and be all among many web professionals. People are getting sick of excessively elaborate, difficult to navigate websites. You can go to my web page and look at how I organized the information on it.

Don’t get me wrong – they have their place. Still, among business clients especially, having simple, elegant, and to the point website is viewed as the best way to go nowadays.

One of the reasons behind this is because simple Web design has become easier than ever for your average laymen to do. There are many FREE easy-to-use WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) web page editor.  I personally like kompozer.

Although Web developers still build the best web pages, there are many pre-existing build your own website templates that can make the process quite easy. With a simple web design program, you can build a storefront, give out information about your business or organization, provide links, and do everything else that you want on the Internet – all while maintaining a professional appearance.

Of course, even if you want simple web designs, you still might consider hiring a professional. Even a simple web page will benefit from the stylistic flourishes that a professional designer can give it. Like in any other business, professionals still get better results than amateurs.

Many web programmers contract on a per project basis, so if you have a simple Web design in mind it can be particularly affordable. They will work with you to implement a project, following your design ideas and suggesting improvements when they see them. Go and compare the different companies on the web like www.Hire-A-Designer.com or www.project4hire.com or any other you may find.

Not every application demands simple webpages. If you run a special effects studio, a design firm, or some other highly artistic practice, you might want to go for flash instead of minimalism. As long as you can make it looks slick. It can be a great idea to take advantage of the high speed of the modern Internet to make your graphics really pop.

You might want to play around a bit with different ideas before you hire a professional. Sometimes, this is the best way to figure out what you really need to meet your requirements. Remember a simple Web design can be the best design.

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