Create a Fantastic Website

Plan Your Website Before You Start Building It

Follow the old adage "Plan first. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail."

Just as planning is important in building a house, planning is also very important in developing a website. Planning can ensure a quality website, save time and make the content of the website easy to navigate.

Websites are not magic. Planning, designing, and implementing a site for yourself, your small business, your family, or for your particular hobby is well within the capabilities of any person with a reasonable amount of computer know-how. A broad range of free and low-cost tools are available to assist the novice Web publisher.

A systems approach to website development is an overall plan that gives attention to all the essential elements in designing a website. The following questions will guide the systematic planning of your site.

Who are your website visitors? What are the content, depth and breath of information in your website? How are you going to arrange the topics and subtopics of your site? What are you going to use to construct your website?

Go over the menu list on the left side. Get a subject, a topic, research it thoroughly.  If you want to share it with the rest of the world, you can use Voda Utilities. 

Grab a sheet of paper and a pen or better yet Download The Free BlueVoda Website Builder - a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor and just experiment with it and make a rough sketch of what you want in a website. Create pages, name them exactly what the page content is about. The longer and self-explanatory name, the better. Search engines love that.

Don't be afraid to use this editor because you don't have to be an expert in HTML, DHTML, or JavaScripts, etc. But you must be familiar with one or two such languages. Don't ignore them entirely. 

For a tutorial of HTML, CSS and other related subjects, W3schools is one of the best sites on the Internet.

You will most probably have "links" - internal and external - pointing to a page on your website or some one else's. A link in a Web document is a connection between your Web page and some other document on the Internet. They are meant to be references to other sources of information.

For the legalities of links and other design issues, read related chapters on W3C Design Issues website.

Web development is a broad term for any activities related to developing a website for the World Wide Web. This can include e-commerce business development, web design, web content development, client-side/server-side coding, and web server configuration.

However, among web professionals, "web development" usually refers only to the non-design aspects of building web sites, e.g. writing markup and coding. Web development can range from developing the simplest static single page of plain text to the most complex web-based internet applications, electronic businesses, or social network services.

Web development takes into account a lot of things, such as data entry error checking through forms, as well as correctness of the data that is entered in those fields. Not only this, but scripts can be exploited to grant unauthorized access to the hacker to gain information such as email addresses, passwords and protected content like credit card numbers.

Major steps involved in developing a website

1. To create a web page, you will need a website editor. A website page can be designed in two ways: in your text editor where you type in your HTML code or in WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor.

2. You need a Web Host to park your website pages.

3. To put it online, you need an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. Simply put, after you design your website (one or more pages), you need to transfer your files to a server of your choosing. Your FTP program will do just that for you.

4. To view your website pages, you need a browser. Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and Mozilla Firefox are two of the more popular browsers.

In a Nutshell
Follow the do-it-yourself steps one by one in the same logical sequence as presented in the menu on the left hand side and you will be amazed how easy it is to develop your website.