There are numerous steps in website creation, but no matter what type of site you will be creating, these four phases will be used even if you are making a professional, easy web site or any type in between. The four phases to create a website is to plan, build, create, and design.
1. Plan: By starting with a plan for your web site it could help you have less aggravation later on. Some questions to help with this planning stage could be: Why do you want to build it? If you are on a budget, how much will you set aside for registering a domain, obtaining hosting, purchasing software, or any other tool that you may want to use? What is your theme going to be? Who will be your targeted audience? If you are creating a site for profit, is the market too saturated? When do you want to have this site on the internet? How much time will you put into the site, not only to make it live on the Internet, but after it is, how much time to keep it updated?
2. Build: Time to start building the pages. How many pages do you want to start with? Which one will be your main page? Start adding some of the keywords you will be using. Many web designing software programs can make many pages quickly but you still need to put in the keywords, content and everything else to make it optimized for the search engines.
3. Create: Writing your content can be done at the same time that you are building a page, or you can do a few pages at a time and then go back and add the content to it. Much of the information you may be adding could already have been half written in your planning stage.
4. Design: Much of this phase may be done when you went through your planning, building and creating phases. The designing part of the site is not only the header, footer, and navigation menus but also the color of the background, text color, should you use flash or not, checking spelling and grammar, are the pages you built too long or wide, the font style and size, and making sure the images are clear. If your pages have a lot of information (ads, banners, content, etc… ) grouped together, does it make it difficult to understand?
Some of these phases may be limited to you because of the software you are using to make your own web site but having a good plan to start out can help with that problem. You don’t need to buy expensive software to make a great looking site. I am sure you can find ways to work around problems that come up. If you do get to a place that you are not sure what to do, take a look at your competition (if any) and see what you like (or don’t) about their site or find a forum and ask questions to help you find answers to your problem.
No matter which order you take these four phases in, once you decide to create a website, they could keep you from making drastic changes later on or even scraping the whole project after you have put a lot of time and energy into it.
