How to Build a Quality Website

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Internet access
Web design software or a site builder
Hosting service
Knowledge of HTML (optional)

Step 1

Think about what types of information your website will communicate.

Develop a plan. This is an often overlooked step. You should do this before doing anything else. Your website is a communication tool. You will use it to relate information to your target audience. Think about what type of information you would like to share and what type of things your audience would want to know. Determine if your website will be purely informational or if it will be interactive and offer customers the opportunity to request a quote or purchase directly from the site.

Create an outline of the site. What pages should it include? At a minimum you should have a home page and a contact page. Additionally you might have an about page, a products and/or services page and/or a shopping cart. You might also desire to publish a blog. Decide all of this first. Decide on your color scheme and where you might place your logo. Your website should be an extension of your brand. Choose colors for the background, headers and text that are uniform with your other promotional materials (i.e. brochures and business cards).
Step 2

Identify your keywords. Once you have an idea of the type of site and what types of things you would like to share, it is time to develop your keywords. Keywords are words or phrases that potential visitors might search to find your website. For instance, if you are a plumbing service, one of your keywords would be "plumbing" or a phrase might be "hire a plumber". Put yourself into your customer's shoes. What words or phrases would you search to find a company that sells your product or service? Every keyword should be relevant to your company, product and service. You can also take a look at competitor's sites to see what keywords they are using.

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Step 3

Write search-engine friendly content rich in your chosen keywords.

Write your content. Using your outline and the keywords you have chosen, write search-engine friendly text to include on each of your website's pages. Search-engine friendly means that your content is original, unique and keyword-rich. Type this information into a word-processing program like Microsoft Word to take advantage of the spelling and grammar check functions. Consider appropriate picture images and other supporting non-text content such as widgets or affiliate banners that you will use on the site.
Step 4

Build your website. Use website design software such as Microsoft FrontPage or the site builder provided by your hosting service. Choose a template that best matches your chosen color scheme or customize your site design using your knowledge of HTML programming code. Alternatively, you could hire a web designer; however, it is usually more cost-effective to perform this task yourself.
Step 5

Choose a key-word rich and brand-specific domain name.

Choose a domain name and hosting service. Your domain name is the url of your site. It is what comes between the www. and .com part of a website's address. Your domain name should be short, easy to remember, keyword-rich and brand-specific. If at all possible, your primary keyword or phrase should be used in the domain name. For instance, Joe's Pioneer Plumbing Service might have a domain name of www.joesplumbing.com in which the keyword "plumbing" was incorporated in the domain name.

There are several free and low-cost hosting services available. You will need to shop around to identify one that best suits your needs. Free hosting services usually include their company's name in your domain as well as embed ads on your page. Joe's Pioneer Plumbing Service might look like http://joesplumbing.hostingcompany.com. This could look less professional. Also, free hosting services usually limit the available webspace capacity provided and don't offer email addresses. To present a professional look, you should at least have an email forwarding address. These are all things to take into consideration when choosing your hosting company.
Step 6

Optimize and publish your site. Web site optimization is the method used to rank your website higher in the search engine results. This is also known as search engine optimization (SEO). If you have followed the instructions on how to choose your keywords, write your content and choose a domain name; your site is already halfway there. You can further optimize your site by ensuring that your meta tags include proper title, description and keywords content.

The title meta tag is probably the most important with the description being a close second. Your title is the one-line phrase that appears at the top of a webpage when it is loaded into a browser. The description is literally a description of what can be found on that page. Both of these should also be keyword-rich.

Optimize every page of your website. Once this step is complete, publish your website.
Step 7

Link to your new website's url from all of your social media profiles.

Announce and advertise your site. Place your new website url on all of your promotional literature including flyers, letterhead and business cards. Include your web address in your email signatures and link to it from all of your social networking profiles. Submit your web address to all of the major search engines and announce it to your networking groups, discussion boards and other industry-related groups.