Before You Begin Creating and Updating Your Site
As with any task, you can streamline the site building process with a little planning. This guide will help you prepare to build the web site you want.
In this guide you'll learn to:
The question may seem silly, but your first essential step is to ask yourself why you want to build your web site. What do you hope your site will achieve?
Try to distill your goals into a short mission statement, then keep this statement at hand while you plan your site. For example:
- I will create an information hub for my organization.
- I will set up an online store.
- I will attract qualified leads for my service business.
- I will create an online brochure for my brick-and-mortar business.
You can always adjust as your business grows, but knowing where you want to go will help you focus as you begin creating your web site.
Who do you expect to visit your site — and why? Review your mission statement: Will your audience primarily include friends or potential customers, industry insiders or the general public? Will your visitors seek certain kinds of information? Will they expect to interact with your site? What kind of impression do you hope to make?
If you want to use your site to generate new business, for example, you'll want to be sure to post your contact information prominently on every page. If you run a club, you might want visitors to be able to sign up for an upcoming event. And store owners might want to accept payments for their goods online.
Visitors to a lawyer's web site may expect a list of practice areas and information about recent cases. Visitors to a restaurant's site may look for a menu and map to the restaurant's location. A party clown's brochure should shout fun; a real estate agent may want to project reliability and warmth.
Consider the needs, interests, and expectations of your audience as you begin to make decisions about your site.
We know you don't want to spend hours and hours building a site. To speed the process while staying organized, think about your site content and make a list of the information you'd like to include.
Are you creating an online brochure for your business? Chances are you'll want to include a welcome page, a description of your company and services, your contact information, and perhaps an email form, so your customers can give you feedback or ask questions.
Building a site for your upcoming wedding? You'll probably want to include the wedding date and details, short biographies of the bride and groom, a few photos, and RSVP information.
Think about your goals and audience, then take some time to jot down your ideas and start gathering your content. Write a description of your organization, a schedule of upcoming events, and directions to your business. If you're building a photo album, start collecting your images and writing captions for them.
Tip: Save time by reusing fliers, brochures, or offline advertising you've already created for your business!
Do you want to include links to other web sites? Make a list of those sites and their web addresses. If you have a logo, make sure your image is ready to add to your pages.
Planning to build an online store? An initial inventory of your catalog items, along with their names, descriptions, item numbers, and images, for example, will help you organize your site more quickly.
The more you know about your content before you start, the easier you'll find designing and building your first site. But relax! Remember that with Yahoo! Web Hosting, almost nothing is set in stone: You'll be able to update your site anytime, whether that means changing a few words or adding dozens of new pages.
Now that you've put some thought into your site content, try drawing a basic outline of your site. Think of the outline as a blueprint of your site structure. Which pages do you need, and how will they connect with each other? You can use the outline as a guide when you start building your site.
First list the pages you'll need. Where will the content you gathered in step 3 fit best? You'll need a home page to welcome your visitors, and probably "about us" and contact information pages. How about a services page? Do you need a photo page to display photos?
Need some ideas? Go online! Check out some Yahoo! Web Hosting success stories, and take a look at competitors' web sites or other sites you admire. What kinds of information do they include? Are they easy to use? Does their organization make sense to you? Take some notes — they'll come in handy as you get started.
Next sketch a basic tree structure to show how your pages will relate to each other. If you need only a few pages, you can simply decide in which order they should appear in your site's navigation (a short table of contents that appears on every page).
Next Steps
You're ready to get started!
To begin building your web site, you'll just need to sign in and choose a site building tool, then — notes in hand! — start putting together your pages. We'll walk you through the process!