Plan It

Before any informed decision can be made regarding what website solution will work best, you will have to decide just what it is your organization is looking to accomplish, when and why.

All About Site Planning

Create a Blueprint

There are three important factors to take into consideration when developing a blueprint for your Web site:

  • your audience - who is going to visit your site
  • your content - what is the subject matter, and how much content on that subject do you have
  • your navigation structure - how will visitors discover the content once they've found your site

Carefully considering these three factors will help lay the foundation for a successful Web site.

Organize the Content

Once you know who your users are likely to be, it is time to look more closely at your content and see how it can be organized. Let's look at ways in which content can be organized by subject area.

  • Standard content areas - Most sites have a number of standard sections, such as About Us and Contact Us pages, to which content is relatively easily allocated.
  • General content areas - Once the standard content list is done, look at the rest of your content and start to divide it into very general groups. In the case of our aquarium fish site, these might include product listings, fish information, company information, etc. Look at each content area and consider ways of further subdividing it.
  • Top-level headings - Content that is of potential interest to several different user groups should appear in top-level folders.
  • Sub-level headings - If it is of interest to only a small number of users, then it is probably more appro priate to place it in a subfolder at a lower level.

PickingThe Right (domain) Name

Choosing a domain name is an extremely important part of designing your web site, as that becomes the name of your web site. Your domain name is the first part of the Uniform Resource Locator, or "URL." There are many things to keep in mind while choosing a suitable domain name.

If you haven't already done so, give some thought as to what your domain name is going to be. For those who are new to the internet, the domain name, also known as a website address, is a word or phrase that a website visitor has to type in to visit your site. It's preceded by http://www, although for modern-day browsers typing this portion in is optional. It ends with .com, .net, .biz, or a host of other extensions that you'll be exposed to when you're ready to sign up for your domain name.

Generally, you always want to go with .com, since this is the most popular domain name extension. In terms of what domain name to use, this is where keyword optimization comes into play. That's right--even your domain name should be keyword optimized. Don't fall into the temptation that many webmasters do and use something catchy and creative for your website. It might be more memorable to potential visitors, especially if you use a lot of offline marketing, but it won't get your site ranked high in search engines. Ultimately, you will want to use keywords to create a domain name that is both memorable and likely to be ranked in the first 10 listings of search engine results

However, keywords in the domain are useful for reasons outside of just ranking by its words. How people link to you and what the description reads in the incoming "backlink," or anchor text, plays a key role. So if you have realestate-mortgage-loans.com it's better than simply remloans.com. The latter is shorter, but the former yields a better link popularity strategy.

What is the best domain name?
Generally, the best domain names are

  • short
  • contain no hyphens 
  • offer an excellent one-, two-, or three-word summary of what the site is about.

An example of an excellent domain name could be cheapknives.com. It's short, contains no hyphens, and, if it's pointing to a Website selling affordable knives, perfectly summarizes the main point of the site.  

Now, Getting Registered

Once you've selected your domain name, you need to register it. Be careful of whom you select to handle your domain registrations, as losing your domain name could put you out of business.

Use a tool such as RegSelect, which can help you compare prices and options of domain registration companies. All registrars require the name of the company or individual who owns the domain (the registrant), the individual authorized to handle daily matters (the administrative contact), and the person who handles all things technical (the technical contact).

Most registrars have rules against using false names, and you'll run the risk of not receiving important notices if you do so. Whoever possesses the registrar username and password is essentially in control of the domain, despite the fact that the legal owner is the registrant, so be careful. Choose a complex password, as this could protect you from being hacked. Hackers could have the opportunity to change ownership or servers associated with your account. Try to find a registrar that allows you to "lock" your accounts. Finally, avoid registering your domain name with your web hosting service. This could complicate a domain transfer, should you decide to change hosting companies later.

Hosting Made Simple

There are thousands of hosting companies over the world, but you need to choose only one web hosting you can trust. The success or failure of the website has direct dependency on the quality of the web hosting provider.

You have to find one that is affordable, reliable, suits your requirements and has an excellent support.

Hosting prices do not really differ. You can make a try with free web hosting, but be aware of disadvantages of free web hosting from slow load time, to data security issues and zero support.

In our experience there are two important items you should consider in finding a web hosting you can rely on.

Web hosts must guarantee website availability of at least 99,98% and ensure backup for their servers in case of emergency. If your Web site is not available you lost visitors. Moreover, search engines can reduce the rank position of your Web site in the search results if it is not reachable. Hosting on not reliable hosting (especially free hosting) will negatively affect your Web site, whether you believe it or not. Period.