How to Build a Website - Essay Example

HOW TO BUILD A WEBSITE INTRODUCTION Developing an effective website requires thoughtful planning. Understanding the entire process before one begins will save you time and money as the project progresses. Although sites range from just a few pages to more complex ones with hundreds or thousands of pages and sophisticated interactive features, the development process remains similar. There are six basic stages: planning, content development, graphic design, programming, marketing, and promotion and maintenance. Depending on their areas of expertise, one may need assistance for some or all phases of your project. Think like a home builder: first, develop a good blueprint, perhaps with the help of an architect; then hire individual contractors for the various tasks, or hire a general contractor. Planning First of all, the developer must determine who the audience is for the site. This is critical, because many design and content decisions depend on this. Is the site for children or adults' Does the target audience access the Net from work, school or home' How fast is their Internet connection' Do they want to be informed or entertained' The developer must make sure that he knows the answers to these types of questions from the outset. The site must be well organized, both for the benefit of it's visitors and to make it easier to maintain. Mapping out the site in storyboard or schematic form, perhaps as a flow chart is considered useful. One can consider using index cards to represent the prospective web pages as they can be rearranged very quickly. It really helps to have some way to visualize the structure, whether we are working alone, with colleagues or professionals. Spending as much time as one can surf the Web at this stage definitely helps. The developer must take a close look at the websites he likes. Many sites credit the design company and link to its website so that all can see what else the developer has done. If one decides to hire outside help, he must make sure the company is experienced with projects of that size and scope. One thing to bear in mind is that a website is a perpetual work-in-progress. Most websites change fairly often because the technology makes electronic publishing rapid and relatively inexpensive. A well-planned site simplifies this process. New content and features can be easily added without having to redesign the site. Content Development The content of a site will most likely be a combination of information that one currently has and information that one will have to create. This may be a time when we may want to hire a creative writer, or for businesses, a Web-savvy public relations pro to help us put into writing some of the concepts inherent in your company and its products and services. One kind of content is customer service information. What questions do people ask most often' If we don't have a list of frequently asked questions and answers, then we must sit down alone, or with our staff, and write one. Then we must post this information on the website. The more the customers can get answers from the site, the less time someone has to spend answering those same questions on the phone or in writing. A content manager or project manager should be charged with the task of keeping track of the text, graphics, and programming necessary to create the content and get it online. This kind of help can be hired on a temporary basis if we don't have the expertise in-house. This may also be a service that a "one-stop" web development company can provide. Graphic Design No matter how well organized and interesting the content, graphics set the tone. We can create a good impression with some well-designed graphics on the home page. Also one needs to repeat a few design elements throughout the site to create a sense of continuity. This is just one of many common sense guidelines to follow in creating appealing pages. A good designer can be of enormous help. The most important thing to keep in mind in choosing graphic designers is to work with professionals who understand the unique requirements of the Web. The technical limitations (and opportunities) of web pages are foreign to most graphic designers trained in other media. File size requirements, color limitations, and screen resolutions are much different from those in print. Even if one has an in-house graphics department, we may still want to hire a Web-savvy graphic designer to bring people up to speed on the demands of online design. Programming and Technical Help Once you have planned the site and created the content and graphics, we will need to convert the information into a Web-readable form. We can do this by converting text documents to HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and converting the graphics into GIF or JPEG format. Learning the basics of HTML is fairly easy. If one has only a few pages to create and some time on his hands, he can probably do it himself. If we need help, we can hire an HTML coder for about US $25 to US $75 per hour. Software that converts documents to HTML (HTML editors) can be of great help. In fact, with Microsoft Word, you can save a document as an HTML file. Once we begin working with forms, CGI scripts, image maps, or online transactions, we probably will need the services of a programmer. Programmers can cost US $45 to US $200 per hour, depending on our needs, geographic location and the programmer's skills. Many web developers offer programming as part of their services. We can also locate qualified programmers by doing an online search. But we must make sure we see some working examples of previous projects, before we hire anyone. When all of our material is ready and we've got a programmer ready to roll, we will need a place to host our site. If one is running an in-house web server, our system administrator will have to learn the necessary skills (perhaps with the help of a consultant). Most individuals host their sites with their Internet service provider (if it provides this service) or with a web hosting company. Marketing and Promotion Creating a brilliant website is fruitless if no one knows about it. With millions of sites, capturing attention can be a challenge. Some developers offer marketing and promotion as part of their package. Visiting the Web Developer's Journal for ideas on marketing a site could be of great help. One can get things rolling him by registering the site with the major Internet search engines, all in one step, with Submit It! A professional Internet marketer can really help spread the word fast and offer creative ideas for bringing more people to the site--everything from advertising on the Web to zippy contests. Maintenance Like a house, a website needs regular upkeep. One must not make the mistake of assuming, that once it's online, it's done. If we want people to return to our site, someone will have to add new content and update existing material; then there's e-mail to answer, links to check, and perhaps usage statistics to track. For a small site, this can take as little as two or three hours a month. With some time spent learning HTML, we could manage this ourselves. Maintenance on a large site can be a full-time job, so we must build the costs of continuing maintenance into our budget. If we're working with a web developer who is helping with aspects of our project, the company may offer a maintenance agreement as part of the contract. We must ask about this at the beginning of the project. Working with the same people throughout will ensure consistency; a new person or company won't have the same working knowledge of the site. Getting Feedback Until now, the primary form of communication between businesses and their customers was through advertising and marketing materials. This doesn't offer much opportunity for interaction or feedback. All that has changed with the World Wide Web, effectively opening the door to ongoing, two-way communication. With the type of fast-paced interaction made possible via the Web, people rightfully expect to be able to engage in immediate "conversation" with a company, especially about its products and services. Ongoing interaction with customers and potential customers can help improve the product and the ways we communicate introduce benefits, gather customer testimonials, and provide customer service. Many organizations with websites have been surprised by the volume and frequency of online feedback they receive from customers. Although this poses challenges for most companies, it also offers an unprecedented opportunity to collect important consumer information, as well as immediate feedback regarding products and marketing efforts. If we are prepared to collect and analyze the information, we can have the equivalent of an ongoing focus group at our fingertips. Not only are these people already interested in the company, but they also will tell us directly what they think, via e-mail and feedback forms that we provide. Indirectly, we can glean a lot from the trail they leave as they travel through the various pages of our site. E-Mail E-Mail is probably the single most important and easiest way to get feedback from visitors. A simple "mail-to" link automatically opens up an e-mail box with the reader's address and yours already filled in. We can also create a more complex e-mail form if we want to collect additional information as part of the feedback process. E-mail is not a one-way street, however. We must be willing to respond if we want to maintain a relationship with our customers or potential customers. They will not be happy with an answer that arrives a week later. If they have taken the time to visit the site and offer feedback, they expect us to do the same with their e-mail. One way to manage the influx of new e-mail is to create separate links for different departments (e.g., sales, service, and administration) so that e-mail automatically goes to the people who can answer it promptly. Whenever possible, we must set up automatic response forms, known as auto responders, so that when readers send mail they get an immediate confirmation that their message was received and a staff member will answer as soon as possible. Forms Forms allow us to gather user feedback in a more organized and targeted way than with e-mail. We can use forms to conduct mini-surveys or extensive ones. If we opt for the latter, we must be sure to offer the reader something in return. If we take a survey of our visitors, we must then post the results. People like to feel that their opinions count, and they like to see where they fit into the mix. Also, we must offer visitors an opportunity to request more information by postal mail by filling out a form. We must also include fields for their name, address, phone number and interests. These strategies can help us build a direct mail database to supplement our online marketing efforts. Each time someone visits a page on our site, an entry is automatically added to the server's log file. A log file is simply a record of the number of times a particular file has been requested (this is also commonly referred to as a "hit") and some basic information, including the date and time of the request, the size of the file served, whether there were errors in serving the file, the site the visitor came from, and the specific web page the visitor came from. (Unless a visitor has registered with a website, it's not possible to know the identity of that person.) A great deal of information can be gleaned from these files, but it can be intimidating at first glance. Log files are definitely not for the faint at heart. A variety of programs can make sense of these logs, from free Perl scripts that do simple counting, to sophisticated statistical analysis software that costs thousands of dollars. The ISP or hosting service should provide us with a short summary of activity on your site. We must make sure that it will also provide us with direct access to the log files as well. That way, we can run our own software on the files and analyze them as we choose. One also needs to stay away from providers who tell us only the total number of hits on the site. All this number tells us is the total of all the requests for all files on the site. Without the additional details provided in a log file, the hits count can be misleading. REFERENCES 1) Kerry Plowright (1999), Internet Business Resource Kit. London: John Wiley 2) Janice Reynolds (2000), Complete E-Commerce Book: Design, Build and Maintain a Successful Web-Based Business. Singapore: Eastern Economy 3) Nick Nettleton (2001), How to Design and Build the Coolest Website in Cyberspace: Hot Design Solutions for the Coolest. New York: Prentice Hall Read More