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Website Buying Guide Checklist
by: Joel Walsh
Can you really get a website even without knowing anything about code, and without paying a fortune? Find out.

The days when websites were primarily distinguished by their code are long gone. Nowadays, the web is a true publishing medium that favors well thought-out ideas. You can get a professional-looking website online in minutes with many website building services and software. But what should you look for? What are the features you really need and which are just clutter?

Content Editing

Some website authoring software packages only allow you to entire plain, unformatted text. Some of them allow you to entire HTML tags. Others provide a WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") interface with options for font, links, and image insertion much like a word processor's. Some will allow you to use more than one, or even all of these options so you have a choice on how you want to format your text.

Template Designs

Every website builder ever invented came with at least one or two templates for creating the graphical look of a website, so you don't have to design the look of the site yourself. But some packages have very large libraries of templates, some have only a few. Some will let you mix and match elements of the design templates, while others will lock you in to one setup.

Ecommerce Functions

Many ready-to-go websites created by website builder software feature built-in shopping carts. Some even come with credit card processing. This is of course necessary if you're going to be selling stuff direct online. But if you're not going to be selling anything, ecommerce functionalities may just complicate the administration of the site and pad the price for the software or service.

Blogging Functions

Blogs are "web logs," but blogging software involves more than just a simple online journal. Blogging technology allows you to send your new posts directly to subscribers via RSS, without them having to visit your site or receive an email from you. Still, unless you plan on updating your site regularly (at least once a month), your website's blog will just gather cobwebs.

Email

Some hosted web authoring systems provide email accounts at no additional charge, while others do charge separately. Some web builder systems even come with modules for creating email newsletters.

Support

It is very likely that you will encounter a technical difficulty at some point while owning your website. Make sure you know in advance of paying whether the company provides only paid support, and if any included support is over email, a web ticketing system, or the telephone.

Photo and Image Management

For many, if not most, people who want personal websites, displaying pictures online is a primary motivation, if not the only motivation. If you want to display pictures on your website, make sure to choose a website builder system that makes it easy to upload and publish images.

Renting vs. Owning

You can buy website authoring software upfront for a flat fee, or you can "rent;" i.e., pay a company every month to use a hosted service. The choice is up to you, but remember that the hosted service will likely charge you much more in the end: averaging around $20/month, hosted the typical hosted website builder will cost you $240/year--far more than most desktop software.

In short, you don't need to know how a website is coded to make one, any more than a book author needs to know about printing ink. Don't burden yourself with learning how to do web design. Having fun with your website starts with choosing a website builder software that will make it fun.

About the author:
Joel Walsh recommends you check out http://www.ezgenerator.com/documents/167.html?%20web%20authoring%20software[Publishthis 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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