Building your own website is clearly the least expensive route to establishing your business online, and it isn?t really all that difficult to do. There are three steps to building your site:
Purchase a ?What You See Is What You Get? (WYSIWYG) HTML editor such as Adobe GoLive, Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage.
Create the web pages using your editing program
FTP the files to your web-server.
HTML Editors
The top HTML editors for beginners are:
Adobe GoLive ($399.99 on Amazon)
Macromedia Dreamweaver ($389 on Amazon)
Microsoft FrontPage ($170.99 on Amazon)
All of these editing programs allow beginners to develop web pages using templates and WYSIWYG ease similar to programs like Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. You simply create or select a pre-made template for your website, type your content into the page on your screen, and hit the save button. All three of these programs ship with instructions that are designed to help even the most novice web user to create a relatively professional looking website.
The only thing you need to take into consideration is to make sure that if you are using Microsoft FrontPage, that you go with a web-hosting company that supports FrontPage extensions. Most do, so you probably won?t have a problem finding one.
Create Web Pages
Exactly how you create your site will depend on the specific editor you use, however the process of all editors is remarkably similar.
Select or create a template for your site. If you have graphic design skills, you may choose to create something from scratch. Most beginners just use one of the many pre-developed templates that come with their editing program. You can also purchase templates from third party vendors.
Create the pages for your site and type the text directly into the pages. The content will appear on the screen similar to the way it will appear in the final website.
Insert any graphics you will use for your site. In general, you should keep these to a minimum because each graphic you put into your page increases the download time. Also, you don?t want too many animated gifs or flashy stuff on the page - they make the page appear unprofessional.
Test the site as you go. All editors contain a preview capability that will let you see the page in a web browser exactly as your visitors will see it. It is also a good idea to test your pages using multiple browsers since there is some variance as to how different browsers interpret HTML code. You should design your site to work effectively with the top three browsers. The top three browsers on the internet today are:
Microsoft Explorer (Download)
Firefox (Download)
Netscape (Download)
The most important thing in building web pages is to start doing it. You may revise your site a number of times before you ever actually post it online. That?s ok, but recognize that it does take time to build a site ? especially your first time out. It?s part of the learning curve and necessary to making sure you have thoroughly thought out each aspect of your site?s navigation and content.
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