Tips for Creating a Website

Websites are a great way to advertise your business, earn money, share your passions or tell people about yourself. A good website can be rewarding, but a bad website can be a waste of your time, effort and possibly your money. To avoid pitfalls and make your website appealing to visitors, follow these guidelines.

Instructions

1. Choose a topic and a good name for your website. The topic should be fairly narrow to make it easier to find in search engines. If you’re promoting your business, that makes a good topic. If you would just like to create a website on your favorite hobby, “gardening” for example, consider narrowing it down: “vegetable gardening,” “rose gardening” or “gardening in (your state).” The name should be catchy and describe the topic. Ensure that your website name is not a registered trademark or there can be legal ramifications.

2. Provide good content for your visitors. Content refers to what is on your website. It can be audio or video clips, images or written text. People come to your website either for information or entertainment. Provide them with what they are seeking, in high quality, to ensure their return and possibly recommendations to others. Most commonly, content is in the form of written articles, tips or facts about your topic.If you are writing your own content, ensure that your information is accurate, interesting and in some way unique so that it stands out from other websites. Always double-check spelling, grammar and punctuation. If you don’t feel your content-producing skills are up to par, buy content from professional content producers or distributors. Or, seek out amateur writers on the Internet who offer free content.

3. Aesthetics can sometimes be the difference between a boring website and a great one. Lay out the elements of the page in sections that are clearly defined, rather than lumping it all together. Use a simple background with a contrasting text that pops and is easy to read. Vary font size. Use bold, underline or italics for titles, subtitles, headings and subheadings. To keep your content easy to read, avoid varying font size and style excessively within the body of the text. Make links a different color so they are easy to distinguish. Scatter a few graphics around the page that are eye-catching and relevant. Each page should have something unique to contribute to the website.

4. Be considerate of your visitors. Don’t make your page so wide that visitors have to scroll left and right to see it all. Don’t make pages excessively long, either. Articles that would require more than five page frames to read should be split up into separate pages. Don’t overload your pages with graphics so that it takes a long time to load. Do your visitors a favor: Compress your files. Don’t use blinking graphics or text, a lot of animation or automatic sounds, as these can be annoying and are the mark of an amateur website. Don’t bombard visitors with ads. Would you tune into an all-commercial radio station that plays a song every hour? Your visitors are there to see what you have to offer, not be bombarded with advertisements. Don’t disguise ads to trick visitors into clicking on them, either. Avoid pop-ups. Ensure that your text is legible against your background. If it contains images, unless they are very subtle and monochromatic, text can be very hard to read. When using image backgrounds, carefully select a text and font that stand out against it.

5. Make your site easy to navigate. Use menus or a table of contents. Include a link to the home page on each page. Make use of buttons for easy clicking. Test your links when you first add them to make sure they are working. Test them all again occasionally, and remove broken links immediately.

Tips & Warnings

• Go for a clean, uncluttered, polished look instead of trying to fit everything on one page. Less is more.

• Less can be less, too. It's all about usability. If the content on some of your pages is sparse, combine them to minimize clicking.

• Provide useful links to other websites you approve of.

• The easier and more pleasant the user's experience is on your website, the more return traffic and recommendations you will get.

• Just because a website offers content that is free to view does not mean it is free for you to copy and use on your own websites. Unless you have permission from the copyright holder, it would be considered copyright infringement. Even if content appears to be free, get permission in writing before putting it on your website.

• Never claim another person’s work as your own; this is plagiarism.