|
John's Works
DotCommification
(tips to build a successful website)
Today's Engineer Magazine - Volume 2, Number 4
4th Quarter - 1999
So you have decided to enter the realm of
cyberspace and join the �in� crowd of web site owners with their dub-ya,
dub-ya, dub-ya and dot com sophistication. At first, this seems a
daunting task, but with a little planning and hard work, you to can
have a first class web site. The guidelines presented here can apply
from the simplest personal home page to the largest company website.
The scope varies, but the steps are almost always the same.
Map It Out
The key to building a successful website involves
planning, planning and more planning. It sometimes is helpful to
visualize your site as a pyramid with the most important things at
sitting at the top and a solid foundation of content underneath.
During the planning process, you need to decide what your goals and
objectives are for the site. Are you selling product (e-commerce) or
is this a glorified online business card. Along these lines, you also
need to determine your target audience. This will help decide the
look and functionality of your site. The best-designed site will get
you nowhere if you don�t design it with the end user in mind. Once
you have decided whom you are designing for, it�s best to drag out a
piece of paper and pencil and conceptualize your site in outline form
(unless you are really handy with a flow charting program).
Map your site out. Decide which pages need to
connect to one another and what is the best way to maximize traffic
flow through your site. Concentrate on making information easy to
find, with sections of your site remaining no more than 3-4 levels
deep. During this process, it also helps to do some web surfing.
Check out what successful sites similar to you are doing. Examine how
they arrange their information and learn from it. Mentally note the
features that make your web experience easier as you may want to
incorporate that functionality into your site. Start to visualize
what you will want your site to look like. This will come in handy
later when you start designing your site or seek professional
assistance. The better prepared you are, the shorter the time it will
take to bring your masterpiece to the masses! You may also want to
consider your budget at this point. Building your website will
include having at a minimum an Internet connection and web space, and
may also include a web design program, professional assistance and
more.
Consider Professional Help
Depending on how much of your time and money you
have to spare, you may want to seek out professional assistance on
your project. At a very minimum (if you can afford it), consider
hiring someone to help bring your vision to life by building web page
templates for you and designing graphics/logos. This will take much
of the pain out of the process and in most cases can be done for a
reasonable sum of money. A web professional (someone who�s work you
have seen and like, not your neighbors son who thinks he�s a
professional designer because he did a web page dedicated to the
family dog) will work with you on the layout of your site and at your
request, can build it so that it is easy for you to edit down the
line. Ask them if they use Microsoft FrontPage to design with or
whether the sites they build can be edited using FrontPage. If you
don�t know how to code pages, it will make your life infinitely easier
as will be explained later on in this article.
When interviewing a prospective Web
Designer/Developer, being prepared is a HUGE help. The better you can
verbalize your wants and needs and are able to show the designer
examples of sites you want to emulate, the less they will need to
charge you. If you are vague, you web design professional will need
to build speculative design and approval time into your bill, thus
increasing your overall costs. Be sure you shop around and obtain
quotes from a few development companies and don�t be afraid to work
with someone who may not be located in your geographical area. Email
is one of the most valuable tools in modern communications history.
Most development jobs can be done without the designer and client ever
meeting in person. Be sure to ask for references (and call or email
them!) and example sites of their past work. Keep in mind that the
best choice may not always be the cheapest. Find a person you are
comfortable with and never be afraid to ask any questions, no matter
how stupid you are worried they are! If your designer seems bothered
by questions, find someone else to work with.
Tools Of The Trade
Regardless of whether you decide to hire someone
to help you or endeavor to go solo, you will still need some basic
tools of the trade to help you through the process of building and
maintaining your website.
Pencil and Paper: Silly as it may sound,
it is still best to scetch out layouts, designs and flow of you site
using this, the most primitive of tools.
Scanner: Adding photo�s to your site (as
long as they are good) adds visual impact and interest to your site.
With the cost of most log end scanners running under $100, it is a
tool that is well worth the money.
Zip Drive or CDR/CRDW: Not long ago, the
best way to transport large files to you designer would have been a
Zip disk which holds 100MB of data. Then along came CD Recordable and
CD Re-Writable drives which allow you to �burn� up to 650MB
information to a CD in the comfort of you living room. The advantage
here is that you don�t have to be concerned whether the other person
you are exchanging data with has a zip drive. Nearly all modern
computers have a CD player capable of playing back CDR disks. Average
cost runs around $300 although it is possible to find some for under
$200. While not necessary, if your site is graphic intensive, the
CDR/CDRW will definitely come in handy.
FrontPage 98/2000: The big daddy of web
development WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors, FrontPage
($149) is a must have tool for any budding web designer. FrontPage
seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Office to provide drag n� drop /
cut and paste editing ability to your website. The controls are very
similar to Microsoft Word and with a little practice, you will be able
to edit and update your site without the constant employ of a web
designer. This is why it is important up front to make sure you
Designer creates pages that FrontPage will have no problem editing.
Ideally, the designer will develop the pages in FrontPage or Visual
Interdev (FrontPages bigger and more complex brother). There are
other WYSIWYG editors out there that you may want to try but if you
are in an Microsoft Office Environment, FrontPages learning curve will
be much less steep.
Photoshop: For graphic design (if you
choose to go down this road) I would normally recommend Adobe
Photoshop. Because of the high cost of Photoshop, you may want to
consider purchasing Photoshop LE, which includes many of the same
features of Photoshop and is almost as powerful. Retail price is
around $99 for LE and $609 for Photoship 5.5.
Gif Movie Gear: If you want to spice up
your site, animated gif�s are a simple and easy way to do it. GIF 89a
is a file format for pictures, which allows you to store multiple
images as a single file which then play back in rapid succession
creating the illusion of movement. Gemani�s (http://www.gamani.com)
GIF Movie Gear is a great way to put together these type of images.
Easy to learn and easy on the wallet ($30), it is tops in it�s class.
Make It Active!
Even the best-designed site will die a slow and
ugly death if you don�t keep the content fresh and active. Spicing up
your site comes in many flavors and ranges from simple to complex.
The most basic of methods include adding news,
information and pictures to your site on a regular schedule. This is
not as easy as it sounds. It takes dedication, time and effort to
accomplish this goal. It�s common to start out strong and trail off
over time as the routine duty of the task wears in. Pace yourself
out, set a realistic schedule and stick to it. Most people will look
at your homepage first and if nothing has changed, leave. Pay special
attention here and find ways to highlight what�s new about your site
in a prominent way.
Another relatively simple way to keep things
fresh is the use of databases of information. You may wish to employ
the assistance of your friendly web developer here. A simple database
can change information automatically or dynamically each day or even
with each refresh of the page. For instance, if you have a calendar
of events that is important to your business, you can store the dates
in a database and instruct your dynamic web page to display
information for the next 60 days of upcoming events. This is a �program
it once a year and forget about it� way to keep your home page
ever changing. Similarly, you can program pictures to change with the
time of the year/seasons or for helpful tips to be displayed with each
visit to your homepage. All of this �rotating content� will add
increased appeal to your web site.
A third way to add content to your site is to get
others to contribute whether it be in office guest contributors or
people in the business of doing what you are doing. Believe it or
not, most people enjoy seeing their work published and will be
flattered if you ask them to contribute. Keep your request short and
simple (after all, your contributor probably has a million other
things on their plate as well) and set reasonable deadlines for
writers to turn their materials in. Most importantly, let them know
the SECOND you place their work online and how much you appreciate
them helping out. Don�t be surprised if they have so much fun doing
it that they ask you to become a �regular�.
The Finishing Touches
After you have constructed you masterpiece and
before you upload your site to your web host, there are a few
important finishing touches you will want to add. Part of getting
your site visible on the web is having people and search engines find
you. Adding Meta Tags and ALT tags to your pages will improve your
chances of being found.
Meta Tags: Meta Tags are lines af code
that will help you control the way your site is listed and indexed in
some search engines. There are a number of meta tags, however
description and keywords are the most frequently used and most
important. The description tag provides a description of the page
that takes the place of a web page summary that a search engine would
ordinarily create. The Keywords meta tag provides keywords for a
search engine to associate with your home page. There are a number of
sites on the Internet that will help you generate tags to include your
page. Simply put the words �Meta Tag Generator� in your favorite
search engine and you are sure to bump into more than you need. Also,
listed under Promoting Your Masterpiece below, the program Add Web
will also help with your task.
Alt Tags: Alt tags simply put are
�alternate text� which provide a description of an image on your web
site. ALT tags are also useful in adding to the relevancy of your web
site�s topic to the search engines. For example, an inexperienced
developer may simply put a picture of your logo on the page without
adding ALT text. Almost as bad, they may put the ALT Description as
�Company X�s Logo�. Here is an opportunity to add text to your web
site for search engines to catalog. A better alt tag may be �Company
X headquarters in Germantown, MD. Leading the industry in the
manufacture of Cogs and Sprockets since 1966�. Also, in most
browsers, pausing for a moment over an image will display the ALT tag,
which may prove useful in giving the user more information as they
surf your site.
Find A Home for Your Web Site
OK, so you have your site ready to launch and
it�s the most fantastic thing since sliced bread but where do you put
it? It�s time to start investigating a good web host. The Hosting
service you pick will depend heavily on a number of things.
Is a Domain Name important to you?: For
most applications, the answer will be a resounding YES! A domain (www.yourname.com)
is the key to marketing your homepage. Most web hosting companies
will help you register your domain or even do it for you. A few tips
here� keep your domain short and try to avoid dashes (www.great-site.com).
There are cases where this is unavoidable because every possible
combination of the name you want is taken but as a rule� try
desperately to find an alternative. Inevitably, people will forget
the dash and end up at a competitor of yours or worse yet, an adult
site.
Front Page Extensions: As described
earlier, Microsoft FrontPage will make your life easier in ways to
numerous to count. While FP Extensions are not required to host your
site, they will allow you to use the full functionality of FrontPage
without worrying if something you constructed will work. FrontPage
extensions also allow you to edit your pages live on the server
without having to worry about uploading or downloading! This alone
will save you a great amount of time.
Sufficient Space: How much web space do
you need? After you finish developing your site, take stock of how
may megabytes big it is. Then at least double that amount and you
will have a good guesstimate as to the amount of space you need. This
takes into consideration that your site will be growing by 100% in the
first year. It is important to leave space to grow. While most
hosting companies however will be glad to let you upgrade your plan at
any time, you don�t want to have to be on the phone with them every
month. Most small to medium size companies fall in the 10-20MB range.
Email Aliasing/Email Accounts: If you are
a small company, you may only need email aliasing, which allows mail
for a certain domain to be forwarded to already active mail accounts.
This will permit customers to send mail to addresses such as
[email protected] or
[email protected], which then can be aliased or forwarded to
your exiting email account. For larger companies, you may wish your
ISP to provide full service email accounts @ yourdomain.com.
24/7 Monitoring: If your business is
critical to you, make sure your host provides 24/7 monitoring of the
web server your site is on. This will minimize downtime and ensure
your visitors are able to access your site.
Customer References: Don�t be afraid to
ask for customer references from your web host. If they choke when
you ask, you may be headed down the wrong path. Find the names of
some of the domains your Web Provider is hosting and call these
companies. Ask the technical contact there about the reliability of
the service and how problems were handled (if there were any).
Cost & Bandwidth: Cost is always an issue
and there are plenty of Web Hosting companies out there to choose
from. As with Web Developers, cheaper is not always better. Look for
�Value Priced� web hosting, which translated, means, a good balance of
services, support and price.
Shared Hosting vs. Colocation/Dedicated:
The last choice in hosting is dependent on your site size. For the
most part, �Shared Hosting� is the best way to go. Shared hosing
means exactly what is says. You share a web server with other sites.
Ordinarily this is not a problem but you may want to ask your host how
many sites they cram onto a server. If the answer is more than 100,
it�s time to look elsewhere. You may also find that because of the
amount of information you wish to store and the traffic you wish to
handle, your monthly hosting bill will add up to $100 or more. If this
is true, you may be a candidate for colocation or dedicated hosting.
Colocation means that you colocate your web server at the web host�s
facility. In some cases, they may set up your machine for you and
maintain it for a fee. In other cases, you are responsible for
everything. Dedicated hosting in most cases means you have an entire
web server dedicated to you and only you with the hardware set up and
maintained by your web host. Once your site gets large, this is the
most cost-effective solution. It may also be the option with the
greatest degree of freedom because in most cases, you have complete
control over what goes on.
Promoting Your Masterpiece
The last piece of the �Building A Successful Web
Site� puzzle is promotion. It may also be the one area where you
spend almost as much as you did on the site itself. It is crucial to
make sure web surfers can find you. Otherwise, all your hard work,
time and effort up to this point are wasted!
Major Search Engines/Directories: Search
engines act as catalogues of the interned sweeping web sites for data
so that when you enter a query, they know where to send you. If you
can get your site included in the Major�s (Yahoo, Infoseek, Excite,
Northern Light, Alta-Vista etc.) your chances of drawing traffic to
your site are greatly improved. The most successful method to get
listed varies from expert to expect but one of your best bets is to go
to the site themselves. Read their policies for submission and do it
by hand. There are NO GUARANTEES that you will get listed on any
search engine/directory. Sometimes the best method is persistence
without OVER submitting your site.
Submission Services/Programs: If you are
willing to spend a little money, a search engine submission service or
program may be for you. Submission services like
Submit It!
($59/year) allow you to mass submit your site easily
to major (and some not so major) search engines.
Yahoo
lists a few hundred other submission services.
Programs like AddWeb ($59) by Cyberspace HQ help you do it yourself while
providing valuable tools that aid in meta tag creation and search
engine visibility.
Common Sense Items: It may seem like
common sense but many people forget basic rules of marketing once
their web site has launched. PROMOTE, PROMOTE, PROMOTE! Add your web
site address to your Business Cards, Letterhead, and Answering
Machine. Consider buying T-shirts and mousepads emblazoned with your
dot com location. Oh, and don�t forget to send them to your
customer. Sure, your new paraphernalia will look good in your office
and your new polo shirt will look great on the golf course but they
will look better in your customer�s office or as part of their
wardrobe.
To Sum Things Up�
1.
Have a good plan! Thinking things through will make the process a
smooth one.
2.
Content is king on the web. Keep your web site fresh and up to date
and visitors will return for years.
3.
Don�t be afraid to hire a professional. Admit your weaknesses and get
help.
4.
Use the right tool for the right job and your experience as a
webmaster will be a pleasant one.
5.
Finally, promote your site in everything you do!
May your journey into cyberspace be a pleasant
and painless one, and may you have many happy netizens heading for
your homepage. Because I couldn�t possibly cover everything here, if
you have comment, question or experience to share, feel free to drop
me an email at [email protected].
I�d love to hear from you.
John Yaglenski is
President/CEO of
Levelbest Communications.
Levelbest is a full service ISP providing value priced, quality
web hosting and active website development. Levelbest's family of
companies also provides many Internet related products including
content driven websites and multimedia production. |
