Settling for a cheap and amateurish site will decrease your value and may do more harm to your image and reputation than not having a website at all. With a lot of commercial and freeware do-it-yourself tools available in the market, building a website might be easy, but building a good website is not.
The site must be aesthetically pleasing and sometimes even entertaining, in order to catch the audience’s attention. But the site must also be informative and functional in order to provide value for the audience’s time and to get them to come back. Unfortunately, many website owners place too much emphasis on the flash and not enough on the substance. The purpose of your website’s design is to complement its message, not overshadow it.
The most challenging part of building a website is not so much the nuts and bolts of development; it’s the planning and conceptualization. Before any actual designing and development can take place, you need to define your website’s main purpose, what message you wish to convey, and how this message will be conveyed.
Choosing an Effective Domain Name
The domain name plays a very important role in the establishment of your online “brand” identity. It’s important to consider how your domain name will be interpreted not in print, but in speech. In print, there’s very little possibility for error because the domain is spelled out. But when you’re trying to give someone your website address verbally – such as when you’re speaking with someone on the telephone and don’t have the luxury of handing them your business card – there’s far too much room for misinterpretation. Keep it short. For clarity, avoid using more than three or four separate words. AcmeDesigns.com is OK, but AcmeIncWebSiteDesignAndDevelopment.com is too
much.
Website Components
When people hear “website” they immediately think of its design, the flash and the wow-factor. But websites are made up of many interrelated components that are dependent on your specific goals. Although every owner has its own website vision, most sites have a basic set of components that need to be included and issues that need to be addressed regardless of the business:
Design elements: Design elements define a website’s look and feel. They include layout (e.g., minimalist, spacious, multi-columned), typography (e.g., traditional, modern, unconventional), and color scheme (e.g., bold, subdued, monochromatic).
Site navigation: Site navigation type defines the logical organization of content. It’s the mechanism by which users navigate from one location to another. Common navigation types include tiered menus (parent-child), sequential menus (brother-sister), and site maps (overview).
Site navigation mechanism: The manner in which the navigation is carried out and represented. Common navigation mechanisms include static menus, dropdown menus, and pop-up windows. Whatever mechanism you choose, it must remain consistent throughout the site. Don’t use a drop-down menu on one page and a pop-up window in another.
Site and content architecture: Site and content architecture defines the physical organization components (such as applications and databases) and content. Site administration, manageability, and security will greatly influence your architecture.
Content: The content you wish to present to users. This can include information about your club’s history, membership and mission, information about your activities, current and past projects and beneficiaries, and contact information.
Content formats: The format of your content. Common website content formats include text, images, PDF files, and audio and video files.
Style and tone of content: The style of your design elements and the tone of your web copy will define the overall mood of your website. Style and tone can be formal, casual, humorous, or offbeat.
Hosting
Where your website will be hosted depends on your site components and business needs. There are plenty of service providers to choose from, each trying to outdo its competitors and promising to offer more for less money. Your job is to wade through all the marketing and find a website host that meets your current needs while still having enough wiggle room to accommodate future expansion.
Take a bird’s eye view look at all potential website hosts and evaluate:
Cost: Most website hosts charge by the month but will offer substantial discounts for
one year or multi-year contracts.
Disk space: Large documents, high-resolution images, audio files, and video files can take up a lot of disk space in a short period of time. If your website is going to be content and multimedia heavy, you need to ensure the website host provides adequate storage for your current and future files.
Transfer limits: website traffic will vary from month to month, but if you’re expecting a lot of traffic, or you plan to stream multimedia content like audio and video, you must make sure the host’s transfer ceiling isn’t too low. You’ll most likely incur additional charges for exceeding your allotted monthly transfer limit.
E-mail support: If your business doesn’t have its own dedicated mail server, you’ll need to make sure the website host provides an adequate number of e-mail boxes for all your employees as well as adequate storage per mailbox.
Technology support: If your website is going to contain user applications (e.g., PHP,
Perl, .NET) and/or databases (e.g., MySQL, MS-Access, PostgreSQL) check to see if the website host actually supports them.
Backbone security and failsafes: The more fail-safe measures a host has, the more likely your website will survive a system crash or failure. Fail-safe measures also help minimize service interruptions associated with blackouts. Typical fail-safe measures include regularly scheduled data backups, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), backup generators, and a formal disaster recovery plan. |
