Tips on how to Plan and Set-up your website

1. First and foremost you need to decide what you want on your website. Do you want an Online Journal, a website to advertise your business, a place to show off your photos. Think about what your website is for and why people are going to visit your website. Websites can be used for personal information, entertainment, information, commercial, communication, and many other things, the list is endless.

2. Now that you've thought of what your website is for, think of the audience, the people who are going to visit your website. Your website must be geared towards that audience. So what might these people be interested in? And what do I want to show them? You can get some great ideas from other website's.

  • What interesting things do they have which you can make for your own website?
  • Theme, Styles and Layout
  • How do they move around the website? Look at what type of navigation bar/menu they use.
  • Are there guestbooks, forms, counters, search engines that you like?

3. Here's what you may need for your website:

  • images
    - pictures
    - logo
    - images etc
  • text
    - information about your business, yourself etc
    - any contact details you may want to display, email address ; postal address ; contact number etc
    CAUTION: Remember this is the internet and your information will be able to be able to be viewed by everyone, so think carefully about what contact information you want displayed.
  • Stories for the pictures etc

4. By now you should have an idea of what you want your website to look like. Now you can sit down and sketch what you want your page(s) to look like.

  • Where are you going to put the navigation bar/menu?
  • Where should the pictures go on the page?
  • Where should your writing go?
  • What about the Title?
  • Also plan out what colour you want everything to be.
    - Should all the writing be green?
    - Should there be a pattern in the background or should the background be a solid colour?

5. If you have a lot of information for a website, it's better to spread it out on to more than one page. If you just had one page then it would take a long time to load as well as being difficult to read and look through. So you will need to divide your content into different pages.

  • First you will need to create the index (home) page. This is the first page that people will see when they arrive at your site, from this page they will be able to visit the rest of the site. You would usually put an introduction or description of what the site is about and links to the rest of the site on your index page.
  • Then you'll need to create the other pages:
    - photos
    - products
    - services
    - journal
    - about me/us
    - links
    - contact us/me etc
6. Creating a site map/tree for your website is an excellent way to help you visualize how your website is going to be organized. The map/tree usually starts from the top, where the first item is your index (home) page). Then it branches out to the rest of the website.

Here is an example:
7. Right now you need to make sure you have all your information/content, images and your site map/tree and you are now ready to go.
8. The most important thing is to have fun and to make sure you let everyone know about your site. For a quick and easy way to notify your friends, family and customers, click here.