Decide what the website is for

You need a clear idea of what the website is for. "I just want a website" isn't good enough. "I just want a website that lets people find out how to contact us and see what products we sell and find out a bit about the history of the company" is a good start.

Decide who your audience are and why they will come to your website

Don't make the mistake of creating a website for yourself. It's not for you its for your customers. You need to think like them. What do they want and how will they want it presented.

Learn some basic SEO and Accessibility facts.

SEO is Search Engine Optimisation and you really need to learn the basics. The biggest problem businesses have is that after they put a lot of effort into creating their website, they type "home made cakes" into Google and where do they appear in the list of results? Nowhere! This is a huge subject and I can't tell you what to do in a paragraph. Wordtracker.com have some good articles and will give you a free trial of their service. Although mainly a US company they now have a UK database as well. The important point to note is that you need to do your SEO work BEFORE you create your website not after. Also look into getting your website listed in as many other sites as possible. The more relevant to your business the better. e.g. if there is a well established website all about "home made cakes" then GET LISTED. You will probably get more traffic from them than you ever will from search engines.

Accessibility. It is now the law in many countries including the UK that you must make your website accessible to all. Like SEO this is also a big subject that can't be explained in a paragraph. Watchfire WebXACT is a good free site for checking how well your site measures up. diveintoaccessibility.org will explain things.

Choose a website design template

Go to www.oswd.org and you will find thousands of free website designs.

• Click "Search All Designs"


• Choose XHTML 1.0 Strict under "Validation" and "Yes" under "CSS". Click "Search"


• Look at a few designs by using "View". Download the one you like best. It will probably be zipped up so unzip it to a new folder on your disk.


• Look for a license file or read the text on the webpage. The designer will probably say that you must keep his or her copyright statement intact.

Change it to match what is right for your company

To edit a website you can use the simplest of editors e.g notepad on windows but it is best to use a dedicated website editor. I suggest using Seamonkey which is more than just an editor and is perfect for the job. You can download it here www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey Just run the installation and follow the instructions.

• Open up each of the files in your website template and make the necessary changes. e.g. the template will say things like Page 1, Page 2 etc. Change it to be Home, About Us etc

Fill in the content i.e. your words and images

Type in all your textual content and insert any images

Choose a web address e.g. www.mycompany.co.uk

You are going to need a website address e.g. www.merseyinternet.com Think up a good one and check if it is available by going to http://uk2.net/domains/ . You can register it with uk2.net as they are a good company but it might be best to wait until you get you website hosting sorted out as companies often give a free domain name with the hosting.

Choose some web hosting

Choose some web hosting. i.e. somewhere to put your website. They will of course charge you for this. You can find free hosting but I wouldn't recommend it. Paid for hosting costs little e.g. £20 per year and is easily worth it. I have yet to find the perfect hosting company but some good ones are Supanames Me2UWeb Streamline Usually it is best to choose the most expensive shared hosting Linux package you can afford. Even the top packages are often very cheap. Dedicated hosting is another matter. This is where you get a whole computer to yourself. It is meant for high traffic and/or high security e.g. where you are handling money or sensitive data. It will be much more expensive than the standard shared hosting. e.g. £50 per month. If you need dedicated hosting then you shouldn't be following this article. You would be foolish to try and do it on the cheap.

• Sign up and wait for them to email you the technical details of how you get your site onto their computers. As part of the sign up you can also usually register a domain name. i.e. the web address for your site. Make sure you put the correct name and address details here as it can be tricky to change later. The person you specify will be the legal owner of the domain. You may want to register more than one variation of the name e.g. you might want the mycompany.com mycompany.co.uk mycompany.info etc.

Upload your website

To upload your website you need an FTP program such as SmartFTP or if you are using SeaMonkey or other dedicated website editing application the function is likely to be built in and named "Publish" or something similar.

Good Luck. If you need any help with this send me an email.