Your
choice of website design software is absolutely irrelevant to the
success of your website. The kind of website you want, and the level
of your knowledge will determine the tools that your should use to
create your website.
"Website
design is a process of conceptualization, planning, modeling,
and execution of electronic media content delivery
via Internet"
--Wikipedia
Wikipedia
has it right, and the most important steps are conceptualization & planning,
but how exactly?
The
goal in defining the concept and planning is to create a website
that will meet the needs of the visitors and will draw the most traffic.
Let's step back and talk about what is needed to design a website
from
the very
first
step.
Website
Conceptualization
The
main keys to drawing website traffic are site theme focus and page
keyword focus.
The
search engines are partial to sites that are focused around a theme
("Irish food", "Lake Sunapee", "fine art",
etc.) where every page is related to the site theme.
Each
page should be focused around a keyword term that is related to the
site concept (fine art portraits, fine art drawings, fine
art techniques,
etc).
The
page keyword focus and the site theme focus work together to give
the search engines a clear picture of what the website is
about.
You
should not just pull your website concept out of thin air. You need
to research the supply and demand, and it is actually
a very
good idea
to start with several possible website theme idea, or several
angles on a particular theme, so you can pick the best one.
Website
Research& Planning
Use
research tools like Wordtracker or
Google’s
Adwords Keyword tool or Site Build It Brainstormer that
extract information from the search engines to find the concept
that the most people
are searching
for
(demand),
and has the least amount
of competition (supply) – other websites with
similar information.
Got
a website idea or two? Go to the Google’s Adwords Keyword tool
and enter your site concept. Try it first with the synonyms unchecked
to just see keywords that contain your concepts keyword. Then run it
again with synonyms checked to also see related keywords that could expand
the scope of your theme. You will also see the search volume for each
keyword – how many times that phrase was searched
for in a specific time period.
You
can begin to collect relevant keywords for one or more themes and
use these to put together a plan
or map
for your
website.
You
will probably see that one of your website concepts has a much higher
search demand than the others.
You should probably
go with
the concept
that has the highest search volume, but there are
other things to consider like the number of related
keywords,
how much
search volume
they have
and, also, the number of websites that have similar
information.
The
best and easiest system I have found is the SBI Brainstorm
It tool
that makes it a snap to research
and compare potential
site concepts.
Click here for a slideshow overview
of the SBI Brainstorm It Tool
Google
does not care about the look of your site.
It
does not matter to the search engines how good your site looks – they
cannot even see what is in any of the images,
including your logo. All that matters is two things:
The
content – the words on the page as well as the Tags – the
bits of text used to label images (ALT tags) and describe the pages (META
tags). This is also referred to as “on-page” criteria.
Off-page
criteria – This refers to information which
is not a part of your site that the
search engines use to determine the quality
of
your website.
Off-page
criteria include the links from your site, as well as
the quality of
the sites that
link to
your site.
For example,
a link
from CNN.com
would have much more importance than
a link from your cousin’s
blog but, in general, the more links
you have pointing to your website
the more important it will look to
the
search engines and the
better your website will rank in
the search results.
In
general, it is much better to focus
on great content and getting links
than it is
to have
a really slick
design.
Fifty
pages of
content on a
plain looking website will outrank
twenty pages of content on a
really polished
and slick looking
website
any day.
Website
Design Tools
Once
you have the site plan draft and an idea of the scope of the
website, you can
choose
the design
tools
you will
use to
build
it.
There
are two main categories of web design tools:
HTML
editors work directly with the web site code, and
require
you to
know HTML
and any
other web
technology you will be
using, like
JavaScript
or XML.
WYSWYG
editors (pronounced “whizzy-wig”)
hide the web page code
and allow you to create pages as if you
were using a word processor.
The program writes
the code as you type and move page elements
around. WYSWYG stands
for What You See Is What You Get.
I
have used the free website design programs
in the
past and they have
worked very
well. I used
HTML
Kit for editing
the
HTML code
directly,
and KompoZer for
WYSWYG editing. You certainly
can’t
beat the price and
they get the job done.
At
the high end, there are the “big three”:
DreamWeaver, FrontPage
and GoLive. They are all very powerful and
very
expensive. They
allow you to use either
direct HTML code editing or WSYWYG. I use
Dreamweaver for
WSYWYG editing but I find I often need
to switch to the
HTML panel and edit the code directly.
There
is a new program called XSitePro that
does the best
job of writing
all the code
for you.
Everyone is saying
it is the
best
web design tool
for non-programmers
and is the easiest
of all
to use.
But,
if you are serious about creating
a
web site, you
should take the
time to learn
at
least the
basic concepts
of HTML,
which are
really very
simple.
Website
Hosting/Design Tool Packages
Also,
most web site
hosting companies have
tools
for creating
basic web
sites. The
best combination
of hosting
and web
site design
tool is
Site Build It.
This tool
allow you
to build web pages
using a
block-by-block
method,
without
needing
any HTML
at all.
Next --
Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)-->Click
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