Hightide Web Resources Articles, News, and Reviews

by Jean Pardue

If you’re new to the world of web design, then designing a website for business or personal reasons might seem like a daunting task. Fortunately, there are many resources and tools online today to help you get a website up and running quickly.

Outlined below are five steps to creating your own website.

1. Decide on a Website Theme

Choose a website theme that will flow with your business or personal goals. If you’re selling photographs, choose a theme that fits well with photographs. Perhaps you’d like a website that offers training in a particular field or that provides useful information or services in fields such as health, insurance, marketing, finance, family, home and garden, web design, etc.
Use search engine optimization tools such as Wordtracker.com to determine popular keywords in your field. This will help you narrow your theme and find a niche market. The more specific you are, the more likely you’ll reach your targeted audience.

2. Choose a Domain Name

You can visit almost any web host to find out what domain names are available. Your domain name is the web address people will type in to find your website and it is completely unique to you. It could end in .com, .net, .org, or a variety of other suffixes. Example: www.domainsitings.com
Choose a domain name that meets the following criteria:
*Not too long. *Easy to spell - even for kids. *Simple and easy to say. *Fits your website theme. *Easy to remember.

Remember, your domain name will be used in all advertising campaigns whether in print or online, so keep it simple.

3. Choose Web Hosting

Web hosting is a must for a website. This is the “web space” you’ll buy so your website can appear on the World Wide Web. You can choose from thousands of web hosts today, but be aware of the pitfalls if you choose the wrong host. Choose a web host that is dependable, affordable, offers excellent customer service, and offers the features you need for your website. Free web hosting services are available if you’re starting a personal website, but are not recommended for business websites.

Be aware that not all hosting services offer special add-on features such as PHP or MySQL capabilities. Not all hosting services offer a reliable control panel for site management and following your website’s visitor statistics. So, be sure to choose a web hosting provider that offers what you need for now and future growth.

4. Design Your Website

Once you choose a domain name and secure web hosting, it’s time to design your website. You have two options: a) Learn web skills such as HTML and PHP so you can design your own website. b) Hire a web designer.

If you choose to learn web design, there are many tutorials and courses online to help you learn. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars taking a college course. Or, you can find a website that has the same features you want and ask who designed it. This will help you find a dependable designer who already has the skills needed for your project.

Either way, determine what type of programming language you will use beforehand. This will be based on the features your website will have.

5. Get Your Website Noticed

It’s time to promote your website. You can promote in many different ways: search engine optimization, paid search engines, free search engine submission, e-zine advertising, and even off-line advertising. Include your website address on everything you print such as business cards, newspaper ads, letterhead, envelopes, etc.
Probably one of the most effective ways to promote is by adding content articles to your website. Articles get noticed by the search engines because they are informational and useful. The more information you offer, the better your search engine rankings will be. If you sell insurance, write many articles about insurance for your website or hire a writer to write them for you. Whatever your theme, provide plenty of content for your users.
Use these five steps to get your website going. You’re on your way to Web success!

About the Author:
Jean Pardue is a freelance web content writer and can be contacted at speed-writer@hotmail.com . Subscribe to the DomainSitings Newsletter and receive 5 Steps to Design Your Own Website. http://domainsitings.com/newsletter/subscribe/

by Christine Anderssen

Domain name registration is the most important step to take when setting up a website, although not actually the first step. The first step to take is to choose a good domain name!

Your domain name is the name of your online presence. Care must be put into choosing a good domain name, since it will live with you forever (while you are on the Internet!). Remember that a domain name is inextricably linked to your website. You cannot have the one without the other. I once had clients who registered a website in their company name and wanted me to change it after a couple of months to the shorter abbreviation of the company name. This cannot be done without harming your online presence! If you had put any effort at all into building your website and marketing it on the Internet so that it becomes visible; and if you have started to see those efforts pay off in the form of targeted visitors who came to your website looking for the specific products and/or services that you are offering, be prepared to lose some of that if you really want to take the radical step of changing your domain name after your website has already been established.

Sure, the technical boffins will talk to you about permanent redirects so that all traffic previously going to your old website will go to the new one, but there are other factors to keep in mind.

1. Your presence has been established through other websites linking to you and using your domain name in the link. Suddenly these links are now pointing to the old website and not the new one. Yes, setting up a permanent redirect will prevent the problem of visitors clicking through and not being able to find your website, but all those lovely links coming in to your website and voting for you will take a dip. The search engine gurus will tell you that Google knows about permanent redirects and all the good karma that you built up by having links pointing to the old site will now be transferred to the new…but why take the chance?

2. One of the factors that Google also takes into consideration when deciding where to rank your website in its results is the age of your site. If you suddenly decide after a couple of months or years to change your domain name, you are basically setting up a new website from scratch.

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