1. Choose a Domain Name - Your domain name is important. Although it does not rank real high for PR, it is the first thing crawled and relevance helps. More importantly, you should create an easy to remember name; the shorter the better. If your site is for a fishing charter out of cape canaveral fl., then sportfishingcapecanaveral.com is relevant, but a bit winded. Tighten it up a bit and use a URL that is easy to remember like fishingthecape.com or capecharters.com.
2. Decide on the web technology to use – Before you think of how you want the site to look and what cool graphics you want twirling and whirling around, you need to plan out the functional aspects of the site. What is your site going to need to do? Is it going to be used for e-commerce, are you going to be updating it often? Are there going to be multiple contributors to the site? Are there forms to be filled out by visitors? Are you going to be displaying secured login information? You can choose a static html site, a content managment system (like Joomla or wordpress), a Flash site, or some combination of. Either way, an experienced web developer can help you choose the right web technology to use for your site.
3. Decide on your web hosting platform - Some choose to host a site locally, or you can go with one of many web hosting companies available online. Either way, the host needs to be able to support your technology. Whether windows or linux, asp or php, access or mysql. Choose a hosting platform that fits your technology and also choose a host that has a solid cPanel for accessing and updating content. Some developers become comfortable with a specific control panel and only like to use what they are familiar with.
4. Choose a functional layout and color scheme – Now the bells and whistles. With thousands of templates available it is easy to find a web design that meets your functional and design needs. Some are free and some are available for minimal dollars. Open Source Templates. A template can be customized to look how ever you want it. Do you want a sidebar on the right, left or both? Menu and header at the top? I choose a template based on functional layout first, then worry about colors and graphics. Changing the look and colors is easy, but table, border, and frame widths and heigths are pretty set within the CSS.
5. Build your pages and continuous content - Now you can generate your colors, images, pages, menu, menu graphics, etc. Design and deploy your header or logos. Size does matter! The smaller the file size, the quicker your pages will load, so a balance between size and quality is important. I prefer to use Adobe Fireworks and export as .png which supports mutiple color usage while limiting file size by eliminating unused colors. Make sure your colors match and flow.
6. Add content – Same applies as above. Images should be of a good quality but compressed as much as possible to save on load time. Textual content should be relevant and as unique as possible. This is where the mistake often occurs by people trying to jump the gun and begin anchoring keywords for the sake of SEO. Don’t write your content for the search engines, write it for people. Grammar and spelling is important. Capture the readers attention!
7. Edit content for SEO - Now we can worry about anchored text. Once the inital content is written I like to analyze keyword density and edit the content accordingly. Generate your meta tags based on the content rather than the other way around. Then, if necessary, go back and add some keyword text to increase density for your targeted search criteria. I will be devloping a quick and easy keyword or tag parser soon, using either text or URL.
8. Publish, Test, Analyze – Once you go live with a site, review it and verify you have the same functionality as you had on your test server. Verify links, forms, graphics, etc. Repair as necessary. Also while on the test server, and online, you should use various browsers to review your site. See what it looks like in IE8, IE7, firefox, etc. Most templates will indicate their browser compatability.
9. Promote your site – Now the fun stuff. Getting it on the web. Search engines will crawl your site frequently and if you followed the basic steps above, the major search engines will automatically index your site. Beyond that, is the deep, dark world of SEO. Ultimately, if your site is functional, relevant and offers unique content, then the next aspect is links to your site. Building links is a job and takes time. My ‘link making bible’ is on SEOBook.com. (Thus the 10 easy steps to building a website post). Also, don’t forget to tell people about it. If your a business, then add to your business cards, print-ads, and tell people about it. Direct marketing can bring loads of traffic to you.
10. Analyze and Edit. – Now your site is live and starting to see a little traffic as time goes by. Continue editing updating and generating links to your site. You can analyze your sites performance online. Some hosting accounts offer analysis, google webmaster tools helps. Keep plugging away. Often you’ll find that how people are coming to your site wasnt what you expected. If it works, build upon it more!
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