About This Website Guide

We'll use a step by step approach to educate you to the point where you can effectively list your requirements and flesh them out into a website, and then successfully advertise it on the Internet. From a simple concept to an online presence, each chapter is designed to get you to think critically about your needs both online and as a small business.

But to start, there is much to learn about the web. First you'll need to know the basic technical structure of the Internet as well as a website. You won't need to know how to code, but you will need to know how a website is constructed. This background will give you a better understanding as to how a variety of technologies concerning function and form fit together to constitute a website. Talk of using Flash to access a server-side script to draw information from a database won't sound like Greek. Developing this technical understanding of the web will help you make sound choices for your website.

We will cover the three main and different types of websites. You'll learn their purposes, and how they are constructed and utilized. We'll then look at variations of these basic models and focus on how different aspects of each type can meld together to create a cohesive, functional website that solves multiple problems. With this knowledge, you'll have a better idea how to organize your data, structure your site and the direction to go when it comes to creating your own.

Once you have direction and a firm understanding of what you need in a website, we'll look at the process to translate your site from a solid group of ideas to a series of pages on the web. From brainstorming different ideas, to developing an overview of the competition, to creating sound and persuasive content- we'll cover all of the necessary steps to establish a solid concept as well as quality content to publish on the web.

With the concept and content developed, we will choose from a variety of services to best display this information on the web. Whether we want to hire a freelancer, web designer to create a custom look and layout for our site, or simply hire a website service to provide the platform and all of the necessary components to produce our site for a monthly fee. We'll look at the pros and cons of both. If neither suit you, you can always build the website yourself. Learning to write HTML or CSS will be a snap with WebsiteIncite's crash courses. We'll teach you enough to be dangerous.

We'll cover how to factor in your requirements in determining which option is best for your small business. We'll also remove some of the guesswork associated with finding and hiring the right web designer or developer by providing a list of things to look for when you're in the market. Because marketing your website online through the right avenues can have profound effects on the traffic your site receives, we'll look at different methods and services available to effectively advertise your site on the Internet without breaking the bank.

We'll also take a look at search engine optimization and how to generate free traffic to your site on a regular basis. First, you'll learn how search engines work, what they're looking for and how they organize their data. Then we'll look at some basic steps you can take to increase your overall ranking within the search engines. To further expand your visibility online, we'll also look at some other techniques we can apply to generate traffic from other sites that have a high ranking.