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Need A Website? You Have 3 Options

by: Joel Walsh

When it comes to building a website, most individuals and small business owners think you either have to do it yourself or hire someone to do it. Web builder software is often the better option for this group by far.

Even if you're a seasoned web professional, you should know what web builder software can offer private individuals and small businesses. Designers regularly waste time fielding inquiries from small-time website owners who don't realize the time, effort, and therefore cost involved in making a website from scratch. Or your brain may be picked endlessly by a would-be developer. Recommending a good web builder program is a great way to help this group--you can even monetize these non-prospects by reselling web builder software or referring it as an affiliate.

The 3 Web Design Options

DIY (design it yourself), usually using software such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage.
Pay someone else to design it.

Use a "website builder" that includes everything you need and builds the website based on a setup wizard that asks questions about your website goals.

Most people just stumble into one of these three options without really comparing. In fact, if someone is even considering whether to try to do it themselves, hire a pro, or use a website builder program, it's extremely likely they really do need to start with a website builder program. After all, with the small investment required by web builder software, you can easily decide to go the DIY or professional design route later. But the money and time spent on professional services or DIY cannot be un-spent.

If you don't have the web design skills that would lead you to make your own website without questioning, or the budget to hire a designer just as easily, your time, money and other resources are probably better spent on other aspects of your website--such as promoting it, planning it, or getting content for it.

Website Options Comparison: Cost

: Cost of software (Dreamweaver, the most popular, runs about $300) + many hours of your life--what is your time worth?

Web Designer: $500-$5000

Website Builder: $100-200 (if a software package); $15-40/month (if a subscription service)

Time

DIY: Depending on your skill level, a week to a few months.

Web Designer: A few weeks till completion (but little time on your part).

Website Builder: Five minutes to an hour (depending on how much you want to play with the options).

Graphic Design: Most people who build their own websites use graphic design templates, or at least ready-made graphics. But there's still the problem of how to bring the elements of the design together into an attractive whole.

Web Designer: If you want to be taken seriously, a graphic designer will go a long way. Still, many people manage to sabotage the designer's work with too many demands. Also, some designers are really programmers rather than graphic designers, and will use templates anyway. In the end, though, the biggest drawback is cost: graphic designers can do it better, but can you afford them?

Website Builder: The advantage of a website builder over DIY templates is that the builder will save you the time of coding the website to stitch all the parts together.

About the author:
Joel Walsh recommends you check out this article on your website! Requirement: live link for above URL/web address w/ link text/anchor text: "web authoring software" OR leave this bracketed message intact.]

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The Topic Of Your Website

The first thing you will have to deal building your website has nothing to do with the web design itself, it's me related to content writing but it must be defined and will effect the rest of your actions. So first of all you need to decide what the topic of your future website is. Topic is very closely connected to another web design issue: keywords. The keywords you select will depend upon the topic you have chosen. When thinking about website topic ask yourself a few questions: What is the goal of the site you are making? What are you trying to achieve with your site. Specify a goal, preferably in one short sentence.

Take a sheet of paper and a pen and put all you can think out about your future website. Brainstorm! Just put everything that comes to your mind: what you want to give to your visitors, what the site is about, what you want to accomplish with your website, what is your experience in the area you would like to select as topic? The more points you could think up the better. Then sort it in the number of importance. Think what points can be deleted without harm to your project. Delete them. Leave only what is REALLY important. Try to get your goal out of those points.

Choosing topic is like choosing the topic for college research paper. You should try to select reasonable balance between too wide and to narrow topics. Narrowing down your website topic might be very helpful. If you have narrower topic that means you have less competing topic thus it will help you to get better position among your competitors. However if the topic is too narrow nobody will ever bother to search for it. Let me give you example: you want to build a website devoted to website design, but if you try to develop this website guess how many websites you will have to beat to get on the top? I got 4,030,000 pages devoted to website design according Google . To check this number just enter http://google.com and then enter "website design" in the search form on the first page. Now let's see how many sites Google indexed with the topic "Flash website design". I got about 22,300. As you may see the result of indexed web pages is four millions smaller. So creating website about flash design will be much smarter then just to make "website design" site and be lost in those millions pages. Note that "Website design" and "Flash Website Design" are not only keywords, the Flash website design is a part of website design but it is smaller part. Searching search engines keywords related to the topic you have selected may be helpful in making decision about your website topic. I'll teach you how to select "right" keywords to obtain better position on the search engine listings in the next articles.

Do not hesitate to reset your goals. Try to think about audience of the website. People like to visit websites with the original and unique content. Will your website be able to provide your visitors with such content? Will visitors come back again and again or they will simply close the browser window and forget about your website?

The better the plan the less work you will have to make. So if you could define the topic and define it clearly you may proceed to another step of website building: choosing a domain name.

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This article may be reprinted and distributed with no charge until the credit line below remains without changes.

Thanks for reading.

About the Author:
Oleg Lazarenko
Production Manager of
Metamorphosis Web Design Studio ?
Flash templates and Web Templates
http://www.metamorphozis.com

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The Topic Of Your Website