How Do I Get Started?

Get a few people together to go over this list and have someone write everything down. The information you gather will be essential to the designer of your new website.

1. Evaluate the purpose of your website.
What does it need to communicate to visitors? What does it need to gather from visitors? If your website will be a store front that offers a variety of products. How will your products be organized? Prioritize these things and write them down.

2. What are your competitors doing?
A lot of great ideas can be developed by visiting competitive websites. Remember, you don't have to reinvent the wheel to build a bicycle. Also, be sure to write down some of the keywords they are using to drive search engine traffic.

3. Determine your website's style.
What will be the color scheme? Will it be funny? Professional? Technical? Do I still need to mention you should write these things down?

4. Content or message.
This is the reason people are at your site. It should be clear, easy to find and encourage people to take action(buy, submit information, etc.) It should also utilize your important keywords.

5. Navigation.
Can visitors find what they want quickly? A page within your website should NEVER be more than 2 clicks away. If the structure of your website has any pages 2 clicks deep, you should add a site map to ensure your content is being seen.

6. Contact & About the company information.
People like to know who they're dealing with. If you publish biographies of key people in your organization, you develope interest & TRUST(capitalized for a reason folks.)

7. Keep up to date.
When visitors come to your site, do they see the content equivalence to dust & cob webs? No one like old content. Old content is history, not news! Stay in the now & your website will too.