So You Need To Have A Website…..
So You Need To Have A Website…..You may have (or work for) a small business, run a youth club or other organization and have decided to (or been asked to) build a website for it. Where do you start?
Well, you don’t start by commissioning expensive web consultants to do to the job for you! Consider doing it yourself – or at least part of the work. What you need to do can be divided into three stages.
1. Designing your website
2. Build your website using computer software
3. Publish your website via a hosting company (you can host a website on your own computer, but this is an option for the more technically advanced)
1. Designing your Website
If you know how to switch on a PC, have experience of using Word and Outlook you will be able to handle many of the software packages that are freely available to design and build your own website. However, even if you decide that building the actual website yourself is beyond you, getting some initial ideas on design together will save you spending too much money paying someone else to tell you what you want. After all, no one knows your business or organization like you do!
Knowing where to start is often the hardest part. This article aims to give you some ideas. So, lets look at what you are going to have on your website first – remember you can start small, and then grew. Make sure you have the essential information together first, you can always add more detail later on. Your website should show who you are, what you want people to know about you, what you have on offer (either for sale or by way of facilities), where you are and/or how to contact you. You may start of with a list of headings such as:
Organization name
Short description of what you are and what you do
Where you are located (particularly necessary if customers or clients are to come to your premises)
Separate pages for each of the activities you carry out (or ranges of goods or equipment you sell)
Prices (for membership or goods)
Contact Details
Do some research – there will be other organization’s similar to yours. Search Google or Yahoo and look at what information they carry, and how they are organized. Put yourself in the position of a customer – is the information you would require easy to find? If not, why not? Make notes on what you would improve about their sites.
Then think of yourself as the competition – what can you offer that is different? Are your prices or membership fees higher? Maybe you can offer higher quality. If your prices are cheaper you may want to focus on the good value you can offer. Even if you are thinking about a site for a youth club there what makes your organization different from the others?
Remember that all material on the internet is protected by copyright, so you must not copy blocks of text or pictures and present them on your own site as your own work. You can, however, reprint articles such as this (as long as you credit the original author), and articles relevant to your business may be a good way of putting content on your site.