the Essentials
When planning a website, there are certain fundamentals that must be adhered to in order to produce an effective solution. These include having a domain name (your online address), a hosting account (your online home), and email (your online postal account). With these things in place, you can start to build your new home and online presence.
The next step is often to put up a holding page, serving to display your logo and contact details while you gather enough content and a developer to build a full site. The holding page also acts to encourage you to keep moving to generate your content quickly, as it is limited in what it can deliver to interested parties.
The baby-steps method is a good one to employ when building a site. Do small bits at a time, without trying to get everything absolutely perfect before you finally launch. This allows you to deal with what you can when you can, and gives you the opportunity to tweak and refine without too much pressure from the spotlight of a big official launch.
the Basics
Put up a simple Home page as quickly as you can. This gives a little more information about who you are, a short introductory paragraph outlining what to expect at that site. It may also provide a link to your About/Biography page. This page should be easy to generate, everybody already has their life experience behind them, all they need to do is write the pertinent details out for their intended audience. This is often a lot harder than it sounds, with the most headaches in trying to script an effective description that you are satisfied with. Keep it simple at first, it can always (will always) be refined later. The point is to get something up that gives people that don't know you a better feel for what you are about.
the Rest
It is important to plan your website very carefully from the start, but the scale of the planning necessary can often be daunting at first. The rule of thumb here is to work with what you've got, that will always grow. If you are in the process of developing a website it is likely that you have a collection of material already prepared. This could be articles, artwork, photographs, products, services, press reviews/releases, audio/video recordings, etc. Websites can be fairly logically and simply broken down into sections or categories. Filter your content into the relevant page sections, then try to put up a bare minimum at least.
A drill through of a typical site could be this: The visitor lands on the Home page, this introduces them to the site and shows them where to go next. The visitor might check the About page to find out a little more about you or your business. They may then have a look at your products/services or gallery. Here they can get a good idea of what you are selling or showing, and decide whether they want/like/need it or not. Many sites now have a supporting Articles section, giving further information such as recent events, case studies, industry news, product updates/innovations, supporting material such as testimonials/reviews, etc. The ability to write and publish online has grown and improved so much these days, that anybody can share their 2 cents. People write articles about their business or interests and share them freely or for a fee for the benefit of themselves and others. Writing articles is an excellent way of furthering your audience's understanding of something, from an industry, technology, business, culture, to your product, service, philosophy, etc.
Get yourself a good resource file and fill it with whatever is relevant to the job - photos, word documents, plans, etc.
As the industry changes rapidly, so the methods of business need to change and adapt to benefit from the innovations and pace. Doing business online is a vastly different landscape to that of the traditional bricks-and-mortar way of business. The scale of the market is massive and so are its ways of getting things done.
From this perspective, pages like Downloads and Links/Network become extremely effective tools in your online arsenal. The Downloads section provides free samples of your work, giving potential customers a generous gift and insight into your business. Software developers provide time or functionality-limited versions of their products, so that you can get a good feel for them before committing to a full purchase. Other businesses provide free artwork or articles to download. Lets face it, we generate a lot of material over the years as we try to perfect our businesses and skills. Why not give away some of the work that we feel we can live without? If we can do it and do it well, then it should be no problem to create more refined versions as we go. Providing free information and service fosters good will, which is key in successful business.
As you build your website, your business, your career, you generally gain inspiration from a variety of sources and masters through the years. You meet some great people and some great minds, so the purpose of the Links/Network page is to give a little credit back, to show your respect and "vote" for another person/business/website. In the web, though, the Links page goes much further than merely acting as a "thank you" card. Referring links form the very basis of the connectivity of the internet as a whole. Links are what the world-wide-web is made up of. This comes in important when you get involved with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO'd High-ranking sites are the ones that appear first in the search lists from Google, Yahoo, etc., and are the ones that get the most profile on the world wide stage. Because of the scale of the web, the sheer amount of people with access to the internet, that's 1.3 Billion or 20% of the worlds population as of December 2007[1], the potential for absolute obscurity or outright saturation are immense.
The strength of the links connecting your site to others, and the network that emerges, define how well connected you are online. It makes sense to work on this section to get it right.
the Best
As the nature of business changes, the nature of technology does too. The web is a volcanic arena for new emergent technologies, which erupt into life or fizzle out with a pop. There are different levels of refinement and reliability, with some fairly standard wide-spread technologies, enhanced by emerging "improved" innovations.
In terms of websites, there is a range of languages that must be learned and fused together with other languages to create compelling sites that mean business in today's climate. We have come through years of trial-and-error with the web to reach a point where formats and businesses battle it out in a war of standards. The final nail in the coffin for High-Definition video was hammered home just recently as the battle for supremacy between BluRay and HD-DVD concluded with the defeat of the latter. Web languages compete not so dissimilarly, but there are certain old reliables that have stood the test of time and have been refined in the process.
HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) has grown through a series of versions to become the de facto standard "mark-up" language - the stuff that holds the pages together. Later Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were introduced to separate the styling of a page (colours and fonts) from the structure (tags/elements). Modern standards have appended an X to HTML turning it into eXtensible HTML. There are different ways of getting HTML to display information on a page. XHTML standards try to get those elements used Semantically correct. This means that each element is used exactly as it should be, and as much additional information is provided as possible. An example is including alternative content for those with disabilities, e.g. visual impaired visitors who use screen-readers (strip the graphics out of a page, leaving only the text content). Traditionally most HTML pages were put together with tables, similar to an excel sheet. All content was contained in cells, divided into rows and columns. Contemporary methods only allow the use of tables when they are specifically needed, but not superfluously elsewhere. Different tags define most correctly what type of content they are containing. Styled lists are used for navigation menus, and "classes" are used to define a general or specific quality to a page element.
For example:
<p> </p>is the basic paragraph tag. The style sheet may tell the p to display in a specific font, colour, size, etc. The
<p>tag can be expanded with a class to display differently in specific places. So,
<p class="first">tells anything after this tag to display based on the "first" class. In the Style sheet you can define different variables, changing the font to bold and increasing the size by a few points. You may also want to change the colour, or the typeface completely. The beauty of this method is that you can arbitrarily name the classes anything you want. There are certain "fixed" tags or words that have specific meaning and cannot be changed, the
<p>tag for example, but they are relatively easy to learn and become familiar with. The flexibility of classes though opens you up to a lot more creativity and control.
With a basis in HTML, an interest/appreciation of modern standards, and a little time to play with the CSS style sheets, very simple but effective websites can be created. Most of the basic XHTML/CSS pages can incorporate PHP and Javascript/AJAX scripting to add more dynamic functionality - like animated image-effects and page elements or delivering fresh content from a database.
It seems practical to start simple and then add more complex functionality as you become more accustomed to your site and how it works. There are certain benefits and limitations to each technology employed, that is why it helps to start with what works, and then provide alternative "richer" content as the situation calls for it.
The "Dynamic" languages, such as PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor), allow you to create dynamic content that interacts with databases or other files. By Dynamic it is meant that the information can be gathered and displayed on-the-fly as the visitor requests it, as opposed to being necessarily animated or motion-based. PHP can also be used to deliver animated content such as video/multimedia in the form of flash or other movie formats. PHP does not necessarily need to work with a database (such as MySQL), but it can provide a much richer and more secure experience and environment if it does.
Databases can be used to store large amounts of written content as well as images. It is often the case however, that multi-media files such as images/audio/video/downloads are uploaded to a specific folder (directory) on the server. These files are then referenced in the database and can be "served" up when called for. User accounts and information can be securely encrypted and stored in the database, allowing access to restricted areas, account information for shopping/shipping services, contacts/network for mailers, etc. If the hosting service provider offers it, a SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate can be obtained to thoroughly protect the transmission of sensitive data, (credit card numbers, personal details, etc. ).
