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Having a website is often the very fist step in getting started with Internet Marketing. Are you thinking of creating your first website yourself? Follow these 10 steps and you will have all you need to communicate your message and do some business on the World Wide Web without spending a fortune with a web designer.
Step 1. Define your goals & content
Many people forget this all important step. What is your website for? Is it an "online business card" where you briefly describe who you are and what you do and make sure people know where and how to contact you? Or do you also want to generate sales or at least collect leads through your website? Will you be adding content regularly? Do you want some parts of your site to be only accessible to certain people with a user name and password?
Before even starting to create your site, take a pencil and a blank sheet of paper and draw the structure of your site. Which will your most important pages be? What do you want to have on your homepage? How do you want to help visitors navigate through your site? Once you have a clear sketch on paper of what you want your website to look like, it will be much easier to create it digitally.
Step 2. Find a good domain name for your site and register it
What would you like your website to be called? Choosing a good address for your site is important. It is a bit like finding a name for a newborn child. So think about it carefully and involve people around you for ideas and feedback. Make sure you check availability of domain names as you go along. It can be very frustrating to suddenly have a brainwave with the perfect name only to find someone else has already registered it.
If you are thinking of "going global" with your website make sure your domain name is international and go for the .com extension.
There are many sites where you can register your own domain name. You can check with a local provider or rely on established global players.
Step 3. Get web hosting for your domain
A web host is a service provider that will store your web content on their web servers and display your pages to Internet visitors who want to access your pages through their web browser. If you want full control over your company website I definitely recommend purchasing your own hosting plan as opposed to relying on a free hosting service. Since it is quite a competitive market, Web hosting has become very cheap. You can get a good hosting plan for a low as a couple of dollars per month.
Most hosting providers offer a choice between Linux web server and a windows web server. Just go for Linux. It is cheaper and it will be easier to install extra (free) applications and features to your Linux hosting plan.
Most companies that provide domain name registration will also provide web hosting.
Step 4. Select a publishing platform
In the "old days" you had to know a language called HTML (hyper text mark up language) to create websites. Luckily, those days are over. Using modern publishing tools, anyone can build a great-looking website without having to learn HTML. Using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tool you can create professional-looking websites without having to know what is going on in the background.
You can either go for an online or for an offline website creation platform.
Offline website creation platforms
With offline website creation platforms you will first need to install software on your computer before you can start creating your web pages. There are dozens of website creation tools out there. I will just mention two "classics" here.
The most famous and complete tool without a doubt is Dreamweaver by Adobe. It is not a tool you can just install and hope to create your website with immediately because it does have a longer learning curve. But once you know the tool there is no limit to what you can create with Dreamweaver. That is why most Web design professionals use it. Dreamweaver is commercial software but you can download a trial version on the Adobe website to get a first impression and start experimenting.
If you are a Mac user, you are in luck since you will be able to run iWeb. This software is very easy to use website creation software. Look no further if you want to get started for your first website.
Online website creation platforms installed on your host
Online website creation platforms can be accessed via your browser, there is no need to install any software on your local machine. This can be very useful if you need to work with different machines on different locations.
One of the most popular platforms is WordPress. Although this publishing platform was originally created to create blogs, it is perfectly possible to make "normal" websites with it. WordPress has several advantages:
It is free
It is easy to set up if you have a web host that supports WordPress installations.
It is very easy to learn how to use
It is easy to change the "look & feel" just by changing WordPress theme (which are widely available, both commercially and for free).
There is a large community of developers who have created additional plug-ins for WordPress to add many functionalities
Two other popular publishing platforms are Drupal and Joomla. These are two free competing CMS (Content Management System) solutions that are widely used to create websites. Both also need some getting used to but are great to create both simple and advanced websites. They also have a large support and development community.
Step 5. Define which "look & feel" you want.
You never get a second chance to make a first impression. The design of your website will influence the general perception viewers will have of your website. If your design looks "cheap" visitors might perceive you as being cheap too. If graphic design is not one of your talents you can get ready-made "themes" for your website. There are also software packages that make it easy to create your own professional-looking website design without having to do any complicated programming. You can also just outsource your web-design by asking a professional graphic designer to create a custom design for your site. This does not have to be expensive. There are many online service providers who will create a design for you for a very competitive price.
Step 6. Create your content
When you have selected your publishing platform and thought of your website design you can go back to your paper sketch and start creating your content.
A few tips when creating your pages:
Create quality. It is better to spend a little longer to write good quality pages than to just throw in lots of "quick and dirty" stuff. Remember your content is going to live forever on the Internet and the quality of your content will say something about you.
Use different media. A website with just text is boring. Add some pictures and videos to your site to make it more appealing to your visitors. You can create and upload your own pictures and videos or you can find/buy some online.
Check your spelling & grammar. Make sure you check and double check for spelling and grammar mistakes. Many publishing platforms have a built-in spelling checker. If not, you can always use Microsoft Word to create and review your articles and copy the content to your publishing platform when you are done.
Create working links. It can be very frustrating for a visitor of your website to click on link only to get an error (broken link). Test all your links to make sure they work.
Step 7. Do some basic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of your pages
Even if you are not planning to go for an advanced SEM (Search Engine Marketing) strategy, it is good practice to follow some basic rules to make sure your site will appear in search results. Many people still do not bother but this is the difference between being seen and being forgotten on the Internet.
Steps to follow for basic SEO are:
Create a sitemap and submit it to search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing on their webmaster tools page. You are only making their job easier. If you use WordPress you can install one of the plugins that will create and submit a sitemap for you automatically.
Create clean url's. This is easiest to explain with an example. A webpage with the url "http://www.yoursite.com/contact" will be much likely to be easily found by search engines than the url "http://www.yoursite.com/p?14". So take the time to create clean url's.
Create a good page description. Search results display a short description of the content of the site. This is the summary people see when your page appears in a search result. The content of this description will strongly influence if your page will be clicked on or not. So take the time to write a short description for your most important pages. Most HTML editors or CMS packages will let you control your page descriptions.
Add tags to your pages. Just like the page description, tags are a form of metadata (or data about the data). Adding good tags for selected keywords to your pages will contribute to generating good search results.
Step 8. Publish your website
When you are done with creating all the content for your first website, you are ready to publish it for the world to see. This means you will need to get your web files to your web host server.
Online publishing platforms like WordPress will allow you to publish pages automatically with a single click of a button.
With offline publishing platforms you will need to upload you web pages to your web host using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Most good offline publishing platforms include a basic FTP transfer function. If not, you will need third-party FTP software to upload you web pages. This sounds complicated but it basically just comes down to a one-time set up of the address of the remote host with a user name and password and you are ready to go.
Step 9. Set up your traffic measurement tool
Once your website is up and running you will want to know if you are getting any visitors and what their behavior is on your site. If you are not interested in following your traffic there is not much point in bothering to make a website.
One of the most popular tools for tracking traffic to your website is Google Analytics. It is free and relatively easy to set up. You will be able to track how many visitors came to your site, where they come from, which pages they visit, etc....
Step 10. Analyze, improve, fine-tune and update
When you are done creating your first website, you could just let it be and hope for the best. But since you have gone so far in learning how to create your site and analyze traffic, why not keep making your site better? Ad some fresh content like a customer testimonial. Ad a form to capture contact information you can use for email marketing. Let visitors ask for a price quote on your site. Launch a Google Ad words campaign to get more traffic to your site.
Making sure there is regular fresh content on your website is also good for your search engine results.
Need more help?
If you are serious about creating your own website and want a hands-on tutorial to guide you through all these steps, check out the Internet Marketing BasicsTraining. This online video training explains all the steps of creating your first website in WordPress using easy to follow how-to videos for people with no prior experience.
To your successful Internet marketing endeavors,
Ivan Rapin-Smith
Ivan runs the site http://internetmarketing-starterkit.com His site is meant to be a resource for small business owners who want to promote their products or services online and for entrepreneurs who want to learn how to generate revenue on the Internet.
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