How to Design My Own Website

Just a quick word out to you all.

I have been busy with website projects (fancy that) but I still plan to be back here soon with more interesting things. I think the most difficult is trying to figure out where to start. There is so much to talk about and so many different levels (I am guessing) of people coming in here. I almost want to just start from scratch and then go from there.

So with that said, what I hope to come back to soon -the basic steps of designing your own website. For now I am going to take a generic approach because there are so many reasons people are designing a website.

It can really be divided into two categories
1) Personal
2) Business

(And of course there’s quite a bit of overlap)

Personal I will say is generally a person, couple, or group writing about themselves, their life, or their experience.

Business I will say is generally a business (fancy that) wanting to sell a product or rather fulfill a need.

Personal can take many forms from a blog (like this), to a forum, to some other interactive site.

Business can also be a forum, interactive site, providing of services, providing of products, etc.

The design you take for each of those sites will vary greatly, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say most of the people coming here are for personal sites OR small online business sites which may overlap quite a bit with personal sites.

So what is the next thing?

1) Figure out the purpose of your site
2) Figure out how you would like to accomplish that
3) Go to other sites you like that may do something similar and get ideas for colors and designs
4) Pick a domain name (VERY IMPORTANT) and register it
5) Get a hosting company. With few exceptions I always recommend a paid hosting company. Free hosting or free blogging sites have their place, but in general hosting is so cheap these days ($5 a month!) that if you really are dedicating time to this, I’d say pony up the money – not only will you get a better product but in your mind you will be that much more committed (very important!!)

From there, you can go two ways
1) Design your site from scratch
2) Modify someone else’s site to be your site

I prefer the second – I don’t want to build my own car. I want to buy a new one (or even used one) and then customize and modify it for me (better wheels, nice stereo, and fuzzy dice!). This means you will have a combination of two things to look at

Fortunately there are so many ways to go about this. You can easily find many templates out there (I’ll point you to some when I go into more detail about this). At the same time you can build up some paintshop or photoshop skills to help with graphic design. You can also learn HTML, CSS, etc. to work on look and feel.

Okay, that’s the general direction. I’ll go into more detail on those steps in the next few weeks. Until then!

Just finished your first website? So it is the time to have a look for some hosting and make a choise. Your first question doubtless will be whether to select free or paid hosting service.

Let’s take a look at some benefits and downsides of these solutions.

Free website hosting :
( + ) It’s absolutely free. You do not want to pay for web site name.
( – ) Your URL will be something similar to username.freehost.com or freehost.com / user name. Even though you save the cost of paying for a domain, if you move your site to another supplier in the future you can lose some or all of your organic search engine traffic. There are ways around that and to fix that, but it can be convoluted depending on how your site is built out
( – ) Your supplier will doubtless include advertisements to your pages – customarily one or two banners, infrequently popup windows. If you intend to use banner exchange on your website read conscientiously their T&Cs. Some free hosts doesn’t permit it.
( – ) a large amount of free hosts can change their Terms and Conditions with little to no warning
( – ) Sometimes the free hosts cancel their free service and longer offer paid hosting only. In this situation you have only two choises – pay them or loose your internet site.

Paid website hosting :
( + ) You can host your own domain. If you make a decision to change the website hosting supplier in the future, you simply transfer the domain to the new supplier and do not loose your traffic.
( + ) Most paid hosts offer twenty-four / seven support thru email or live discuss and many of them provide toll-free telephone support.
( + ) you should expect better uptime then on free host. Some paid hosts offer uptime guarantee. In other words, you get what you pay for.
( – ) Paid hosting cost cash ) Before you make the call if select free or paid host you must answer this question : how large ambitions have I got with my website? If you’re beginning small private page for your friends consist of some *.html files then a free host will be adequate. In case you intend to run significant business site, need PHP, database and do not need adverts on the site I like to recommend to have a look for quality paid host.

But really how much is paid hosting? If you prepay a year in advance it can be as little as $4 a month! That is basically giving up, say, one Starbucks latte a month!

I honestly do not know why people would go for free webhosting when there are so many advantages to paid webhosting and yet I see questions on this all the time at the various forums and answer sites – what is the best free web host, etc..etc. I can see using a free webhost for a blog (like blogger.com or wordpress.com) but other than that, I don’t really see the benefit of free webhosting.

Check out some great webhosting companies here:
http://witchwebhost.com/likes/hostgator.html
http://witchwebhost.com/likes/hostrocket.html
http://witchwebhost.com/likes/inmotion.html
http://witchwebhost.com/likes/webhostingbuzz.html

Coming soon: more on dedicated vs reseller vs “regular” web hosting.

Kind of a “bane of my existence” for many online entrepreneurs. This question happened to come from someone running a dating website. The question was on http://answers.yahoo.com (where I seem to be hanging out a lot). Here was my answer for him which he chose as the best answer:

You didn’t post a link to your website so I couldn’t take a look, but people who come to your website probably are not interested in clicking on your ads. One thing about adsense is people know they are ads and maybe they’re more interested in dating and meeting people.

I’d suggest finding a few products you can sell (affiliates products) that may be of interest to your users. Something about how to pick up women, etc.. etc..

Also find ways to market your site for free without paying adwords because than you can get organic traffic instead of adwords traffic. There are a lot of resources for this. Search for how to generate backlinks… examples like
1) submit articles to article directories with link back to site
2) answer dating questions on answers.yahoo.com with link to site (if applicable, don’t want to get banned)
3) social bookmarking
4) if you have a for pay product (like a membership), create a generous affiliate program
5) hold some sort of event for your forum users, maybe local events? And advertise it in the events section on craigslist

Those were some of the ideas I posted to him.

The thing with adsense is you need to have a site where people will want to click on the ads. In this case, a relationship site, you have an end product. Why would people want to click away from a relationship site? They want to find a relationship. The only reason they would buy something is something that will increase the likelihood of them getting a relationship such as a membership fee with increased features (ala classmates.com) or possibly an ebook, something about now that you have a successful first date, what do you do next?

People do definitely click on the ads though – as this online businessman found out because he definitely was getting the clicks (and paying for it), but then trying to make money on adsense alone from that would be very tough.

If you are going for adwords, make sure you have a sellable end product and not just an adsense site.

Good luck!