|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Getting Started on your First Web Page |
How to
create a
website
Welcome to VodaHost
web hosting,
VodaHost is committed to helping you create your own
website and getting you online as quickly as
possible. Creating your first web page can be a daunting
and confusing task. Where do I get started? What should
I do? However, it does not have to be this way, creating
a web page can be a fun and rewarding experience if you
just follow a few simple guidelines, which we will
outline for you here.
The first thing that you should do when getting ready to
construct your first web page is to define it. What do
you want your web page to do? Do not just start
constructing your page, really think about it. You
should think about how you want it to look, what
information you want to provide to your perspective
customer in order to persuade him to buy your product or
service rather than going elsewhere.
Be sure that you organize the page well, think of your
Home Page like the Table of Contents page in a
web design book, it
is there so that your customers know where to go in your
site for their particular needs, or just to familiarize
themselves with your product. Lastly, when defining your
site you should do your research. Always visit your
competitions web site to see how they have organized
their site, so you can make yours better, whether it is
just including more information about your product, or
simply making a better designed site.
Now that you have given some serious thought to how you
want create your
own website, and what you want to include
in it, you need to think of a name for it. There are
various approaches to finding the right name for your
web site. The first is to make the name logical, for
instance, Nike’s web site is nike.com. Another approach
is to make the name memorable so that your customers can
type it in without thought, the name does not have to be
descriptive of the product you sell, for example
amazon.com sells books. Further, you should keep the
name as short as possible so that it is easy for your
customers to type into the url field.
Now that you have your web page named and given some
thought into how you want it to look, here are some
pointers for building your site. If you have pictures on
your web page go over them first with a photo editing
program, like pix resizer,
so that the customer’s browser does not have to crunch
them. This will also speed up the download speed of your
page so that the customer can view quickly without
having to wait for large picture files to appear on the
screen.
One of the most annoying things for people surfing the
web are pages that take a long time to download. All
those fancy graphics will not do you any good if instead
of waiting for the page to download the viewer closes
his browser and goes elsewhere, so consider going light
on the pictures and heavy on the information content.
You should also put some serious thought into what color
fonts you are going to use with our
website builder, and the background color as
well. When in doubt, remember that a white background
with black text has been successful for thousands of
years!
Your website should also be easy to navigate, all your
links should be obvious to the viewer, and should be
self explanatory or have information about where the
link will take them. Try to keep the number of links you
have low, the viewer does not want to spend a lot of
time waiting for links to download, chances are, like
you, he is pretty busy! Further, always link back to
your homepage in order to make navigating your web page
easier for your potential customers.
Now, before you even open up
BlueVoda, you should
construct your web site on paper. Decide the number of
pages you want to have inside of your site, and
determine logical titles for them. Think of any pictures
that you might want to put on each page and where you
are going to put them in order to be most effective. You
should plan out your hyperlinks now, as it will make
keeping track of them later a lot easier and save you
time trying to figure out why they are not working
properly. Decide where you want to put any buttons that
you might create for hyperlinks as well. Lastly write
out any information content you will be putting onto
your web page in Microsoft Word first so you can detect
any spelling errors you might have made. You can cut and
paste parts into BlueVoda later.
Lastly, familiarize yourself with BlueVoda before you
start using it. Watch the
free tutorial videos that we offer so
that you have an idea of what you can do with BlueVoda.
Further, you should make a practice page first so that
you can get a feel for BlueVoda and some experience
using it before you start constructing a page which you
will publish on the World Wide Web.
It takes two to three months to learn how to use
Dreamweaver and at least a month to learn FrontPage,
while you can learn BlueVoda in hours. Practice adding
and deleting text, pictures, and hyperlinks until you
can do these actions with ease.
Building a web site with the BlueVoda
website maker it is simple and easy if
you follow the above steps. The most important part of
the construction process actually takes place before you
open BlueVoda. Think of constructing your web site like
taking a test back in school, those who prepared before
the test probably did better than those who just went in
without even opening their books.
So be sure to prepare before you start, think of the
content you want to put in, think about your links,
think about your web site’s name, draw up an outline on
paper before you start constructing the page and most
importantly
WATCH
THE TUTORIALS before you start!
In a nutshell
“Plan Your Work and Work Your Plan”
|
|
