Making a Website

SO. YOU'VE DECIDED. It's time for you to have a website. Now, how do you go about it?

There's a huge range of options. What about making your own site? You can spend the time to learn HTML (several versions to choose from!)....or you can use one of many What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get software programs, without knowing a lick of HTML (and what-you'll-get-that-you-WON'T-see is a mountain of unnecessary code, bloating the file size of your pages, lowering your search engine ranking).

You can buy ready-made templates (which themselves may be software-generated), and do your best to fit your material into them. Or you can hire someone to make a website for you (at charges anywhere from $100 to $10,000, for a few basic pages). Then what?

Then you have to get your site hosted somewhere. Again, there's a great range of options: everything from free hosting (usually with advertising banners) on someone else's domain....to having your own domain hosted on your own private ("dedicated") server!

Then you have to think about search engine optimization. Once again, you can do it yourself or hire it done -- but someone had better find a way to get your site near the top of the search list, or you'll be lonelier than a Maytag Repairman.

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DON'T PANIC! Don't let yourself be swept away in the information overload! Steer a course for somewhere near the middle. You can learn a bit of HTML, and still hire someone to make a really good site for you. Between the extreme lows and extreme highs of the price range, you can find reliable, talented people who will collaborate with you to produce what you have in mind (or sometimes offer better suggestions).

You can help greatly by doing some preliminary work before you even look for a collaborator. Before you get to the nuts-and-bolts of actually making a website, it's helpful to know what you're making a website for. What precisely do you intend your site to accomplish? Getting clear on that will suggest or determine many things about the site, from its infrastructure to page layout, to color scheme, fonts, even writing style. The very first thing it may determine, in fact, is your domain name itself!

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The writings presented here represent opinions and experiences
of their authors, and are meant to be taken as exactly that.