Web - Site Construction

Now you are ready for a website construction. Before proceeding further, you have to take many factors into consideration. I cannot list out each and everything but I have described the major factors in this tutorial which will help you to have a better website −

What to Put on Your Website?

What you would have on your website totally depends on your business and the nature of your website. Here is a list of pages that you might want to create for your website.

• Attractive Home Page: Always required for every website.
• List of Product and Services along with complete detail.
• Complete Pricing Information.
• About your company and nature of business including your achievements.
• About your staff and if possible their experience.
• Your complete contact information.
• Frequently Asked Questions.
• Success Stories and Feedback from Customers.

Finally, make your site useful and interesting for your customers. Your site visitors are your customers and they should find each and everything they are looking for. Customer satisfaction should be your prime concern.

How to Design Your Website?

You should not simply start developing your website, otherwise you will end up with a bogus website. First, you should put a complete plan and your design on a paper or in an electronic document.
In this section, we have listed out a few points which can help you to design a better website −

• Consider what technology you are going to use to develop your website. Adopt one which gives you better flexibility and rapid development opportunities and then design it accordingly.
• Design a generic framework so that in future you can enhance and modify your website by putting minimal effort.
• Design a site to keep required performance in mind. If you are designing database driven website then lot of effort has to put to design good database schemas.
• Keep your design as simple as possible so that any new developer should become familiar with your design as soon as possible.
• Identify repeatable components of your website and then keep them separate and try to use them wherever possible.
• Identify the nature and qualification of your site visitors and give importance to look and feel accordingly.
• Think from the perspective of a site visitor. If you were a visitor, then how would you like to see this website? If the same site belongs to somebody else, then would you like to spend some time on such site?
• You should create a search engine friendly website.

Once again....your presentation should be unique and attractive, otherwise there are a lot of websites available on the Internet and it will be difficult for you to retain a site visitor for more than a minute.

How to Make a Website Interactive?

Many statistics show that if you are able to retain your site visitors for a long time, then they do bigger shopping and visit the site again and again.
So make sure you have done something for your site visitors to do on your website. Offering a lot of quality information can serve as a great magnet for visitors.
Here is a list of some interactive tools that you can add to your website without any programming skills or incurring any costs −

• Poll
• Forum
• Guest book
• Chat room
• Greeting cards
• Tell-a-friend about this site
• Feedback form
• Live customer service
• Daily joke or daily cartoon
• Daily news headlines
• Site Search Engine
• Mailing List
• Automated Frequently Asked Questions
• The list can go on and on, depending on what will attract your type of visitors.

How to Code Your Website?

Finally, when you start coding for your website, you should be well aware of the following tips for a better website −

• Your site should meet all the quality requirements defined by W3C. Today we are using XHTML to develop any website. XHTML is just a cleaner version of HTML.
• You should keep validating your source code using W3C Validator.
• Do use appropriate comments but avoid using to many comments inside HTML files.
• Keep your style sheets and JAVA or VB scripts into separate files and then include them where ever is required.
• Do not use too much graphics in your web pages.
• Try to keep your web pages static instead of generating them dynamically.
• Make sure there is no broken link on any web page.
• Test your developed web page in major browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, etc.
• Test your all the scripts for all the possible scenarios. Do not host any page without complete testing.

How to Create a Search Engine Friendly Website?

It is very important to make your website search friendly, otherwise you will be away from a large chunk of your customer base which comes from search engines like google and yahoo.
This subject is so important that we have put a complete tutorial on Search Engine Optimization and I will strongly recommend you to go through this tutorial before you start developing your website.

Securing Your Source Code Frequently

While developing your website, it is very important to keep a backup of your complete source code. Many times, you might accidentally delete a file. If you have a backup, then you can restore previous files and start doing your work.
It is a good practice to take backup on an hourly basis or at least on a daily basis. Keep this backup on a different machine or media.