Website Basics Part Two: Content is King
OK so we have a domain name but what next… how do we turn that into a website? Well a basic website is really just a collection of files (text, images and layout information known as HTML). You basically have 3 choices:
- Learn the basics and put a site together yourself
- Pay a professional design studio to build a bespoke site for you
- Buy an ‘off the peg’ site designed for your needs
Building a website yourself can be very rewarding. Not only will you learn a lot during the process, but you’ll not be restricted by budget costs - you can build a site as big or small as you like and have total control over it’s design. The problem is that there is a lot more to web design than just typing some text and arranging it neatly on a page.
Web designers fight a constant battle. Every page designed is a compromise between perfect visual design, practicality, usability, accessibility and search engine friendliness! Not only does your site need to look great to a potential visitor but what about to search engine spiders? They are the programs which tirelessly trawl the web indexing it’s pages. If your page doesn’t confirm to some pretty technical standards you could be limiting the number of people who can find it… and what’s the point of a site that nobody visits? To get an idea select view>source from your browser if you’re using Internet Explorer (Firefox users select view>page source, other browsers are similar too!) and you’ll see the HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) that describes the page. This is what the search engines see, a little different to how it looks to a human I’m sure you’ll agree!
The alternative of hiring a professional designer to build a site for you could produce excellent results, but these will be accompanied by a rather hefty bill. However, whether you build the site yourself, or hire a professional, you will need to write the copy (text) to fill out the pages. If you’re not experienced in writing copy you might want to do some research before you start. Having the right content could mean the difference between getting a lead or not!
The alternative then would be an ‘off the peg’ website. These are small, pre-scripted, professionally designed sites which are put together specifically for our purposes and available usually for a small monthly fee. There are quite a few suppliers out there so do shop around but check out www.mm-websites.com for Kleeneze specific sites, pre-scripted in English, Dutch and German for only £5.99 per month (at time of writing) which is very competitive.
So what sort of ‘off the peg’ site do you get for your money? Well you get a small but effective site, professionally designed and built, a feedback form for collecting leads, and usually some form of minor customisation (email and phone numbers etc.) Some suppliers, such as mlm-websites.com, also include visitor tracking statistics and auto-responders.
Whichever route you choose your site will need to be hosted. Hosting is simply rental of server space where your website physically resides. It is a rather techie subject but suffice to say that an ‘off the peg’ site normally comes with hosting, a professional designer would include hosting in their quote, and if you decide to ‘go it alone’ there are plenty of hosting companies out there - just shop around for a good deal.
We’ll come back to content more specifically in a future post but that’s all for today, next we need to collect our visitor’s details which is tomorrows lesson!