3 Things To Do BEFORE Starting a Website
by Robyn Harton
Many people start setting up a website before they've
really gotten prepared for it. Then they find that their
site just isn't working right for them.
There are 3 things you should do before you ever start
writing your website, though. If you do them, you will
find that your site works much better for you. It is almost
certain to save you a lot of headaches in the long run
too.
The first thing is to decide on your site's goals. Decide
what you want your site to do. Is it a home page just
for fun? Is it to sell widgets to people in your area
or all over the world? (See related article on website
goals at
http://rahcreative.com/articles_tips/websitedo_vol2.html.)
Knowing what you want your site to accomplish is the first
step to getting there.
Step two is to decide the general plan of how you want
to get your website created. Figure out what needs to
be done: graphics, web design, writing articles, databases,
forms, marketing, maintenance, updates, web hosting, and
who is going to do it. Do you want to do it all yourself?
Do you want to hire someone to do all of it? Or do you
want to do parts yourself and hire help for other parts?
Thirdly, you need to create a budget of website building
resources. This means estimating how much time, energy,
and money you will spend on it to make it meet the goals
you've set.
For any parts of the site you want to do yourself, you
should consider time, energy, and yes, money too. For
instance, you may need to buy a graphics program, learn
how to use it, and then actually take the time to make
graphics for your site. The same for doing the HTML, scripts,
databases, forms, etc.
For parts that you want to hire someone to do, you will
need to budget not only money, but also time and energy.
The money part is fairly easy to understand. The time
and energy part is for things like finding the people
you want to hire, giving them information so that they
can do the best job, and the like.
Doing these 3 things before starting your website will
put you on the road to making your site a success.
