How To Build a Website

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One of the principal keys to success on the Internet is learning and understanding how to build a website.

The appearance of your web site or your web design will to a very large extent, determine your success or failure as your product or service will be judged by the image conveyed by your website. Poor website design has already been identified as one of the leading causes of small business failure online.

So what really are the principal elements of good website design and are there any special “how to build a website” rules to follow?

In summary the following are the main good website design requirements:

• How to Build a Website Rule 1 – Your website should contain theme-based content;
• How to Build a Website Rule 2 – You should avoid using Banners;
• How to Build a Website Rule 3 – Your website should Not Sell. It must Presell;
• How to Build a Website Rule 4 – Pay close attention to your website’s Look and Feel;
• How to Build a Website Rule 5 – Pay close attention to your website Navigation;
• How to Build a Website Rule 6 – Pay close attention to your website’s Fonts;
• How to Build a Website Rule 7 – Pay close attention to your website’s Background and Text Colors;
• How to Build a Website Rule 8 – Your website should have Printer-friendly Web Pages;

How To Build a Website – Theme-based Content – So what exactly is a Theme-based Content website? It is a site based upon a theme. Each and every page of the site focuses on a single topic that is related to that theme.

For example lets say your theme is golf . Topical pages would include:

• The Masters;
• The British Open;
• Tiger Woods; and so on

We call each topical page a keyword focused content page. Your site could easily grow to over 150 pages, each of which focuses on a different golf-related topic. The net sum of all the information on all your pages forms the Content of your site – the first good website design element.

How To Build a Website – Avoid Banners – Retinal studies, conducted during usability testing, have shown that Web surfers actually avoid banners and banner ads. Yes, their eyes look away, so naturally your website traffic will be low.

How To Build a Website – Don’t Sell. PREsell – A common error made by many webmasters is …selling instead of PREselling. People resist sales efforts, so your click through actually goes down. A visitor arrives at a website that is no more than one, big sales site. Put yourself in that visitor’s shoes for a moment. You do not see interesting and inspiring content – you see a sales effort. But you were looking for content!

If your site is basically a “bunch of sales letters”, you are not building any credibility and likability with this visitor. Your visitor ends up feeling “pitched” by just another site doing the pitching. So, just like the banner ad, your visitor is not very likely to click through to your payment link.

How To Build a Website – Look & Feel – Select a style that matches your theme — choose the one that best matches the “Look & Feel” for your site’s theme. It’s a good idea to preview each style in a full screen (by clicking the Preview button in each style template) before making your decision. Start by choosing a Color Scheme for the style that you like best.

How To Build a Website – Navigation – When you begin designing your pages, please keep in mind that your visitors may enter your website from pages other than your home page (index page). So you need to make sure you include good navigational links on every page.

You should place your navigational links together at the top, bottom, left or right side of each page. Also you should use tables to align your links neatly and maintain a balanced, organized and uniform appearance throughout your website.

How To Build a Website – Fonts – One of the most important parts of a web page is text – both text font and text size. The way in which you display the text on your web page will have a great impact on your success as it can make your page look either professional or un-professional.

When placing text within your web page, always be consistent with your choice of fonts. In other words, don’t use different fonts throughout your pages. The standard fonts used on the Internet are Arial and Verdana. The standard text size is 2. Arial and Verdana are the standard simply because they are the easiest to read on a computer screen.

Headlines, which require a larger font size, are a bit different. A popular headline font used is Georgia, as it displays nicely in the slightly larger font size.

How To Build a Website – Background & Text Colors – Be selective of your background and text colors. Busy backgrounds make text difficult to read and may draw the attention away from the text. Also, always be consistent with your background theme on each page of your site.

Give some careful thought to your choice of colors, as colors affect your mood and will have an affect on your visitors as well.

How To Build a Website – Printer Friendly Web Pages – Reading from a computer screen is uncomfortable at the best of times, so users may often want to print the page they’re viewing. The problem is that web pages don’t usually lend themselves to print.

Unless your web page width is 600 pixels or less, the chances are that your page copy will not fit in the printed page, and important information will be cropped-out.

Additional Reading:

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Technorati Tags: how to build a website, presell, theme-based, web design, Website Building

Tags: how to build a website, presell, theme-based, web design, Website Building