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Free Report by Jon Esposito, |
| Setting Up Your Website |
| July 11, 2008 | ||
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(You will probably want to be involved in the development and maintenance of the site.) There are so many different ways to set up your website, the options are limitless. Where do you start? First ask yourself a few basic questions: 1) What is the purpose of your site? * Marketing tool * Product or service sales * Informational * Social networking * etc... 2) What impression do you want to make? * Formal * Youthful * Busy or very clean * Professional * Down-to-earth / grass roots 3) Do you want to build and maintain the site yourself or hire someone? 4) How often will you be updating the content on the site? 5) How much money do you want to spend setting up and maintaining the site? Once you have determined the answers to each of these questions you need to Start by sitting down and making a rough sketch of what you think you want the site to look like as well as any special features you want it to have. This just needs to be a rough enough sketch to help guide the next phase. Now that you know what your site is for and have an idea of what it will look like sit down and have some fun. Search the web for sites that have the look, feel, and features that you like. Look at potential competitors to see what is common in your industry. You can decide whether you want to fit the mold of what makes your customers comfortable, or if you really want to be a heretic and get creative. Look at potential partner sites and go to your favorite sites. Keep searching until you have a very good feel for what you are looking for. Bookmark and print out those pages that you like so you can use that as a model for your site. You will use this as a starting point for your own design. Whether you are creating the site by yourself or have hired a team of designers to create the site for you, you will be able to use this as a model and be able to describe your specific tweaks. Once you have your design you need to decide how involved you want to be in the implementation and maintenance of the site. You can: a) Build a raw site from scratch - this requires expert skills, time and money, b) Use a content management system (CMS) - such as Joomla or Drupal or Wordpress or, c) Use a site in a box - such as Yahoo SiteBuilder (www.yahoo.com/sitebuilder) Unless you are already an expert in graphics, CSS, HTML, and PHP you will want to hire at least some help. If you have the money, you can hire a full professional team to design and build your website for you from the ground up. However, it is also very easy and affordable to hire part-time contractors to assist only where needed. Unless you have enough money to hire experts to build the site for you and have a team that can maintain it, you will probably want to be involved in the development and maintenance of the site. I recommend a content management system (CMS). My two favorites are Joomla and Wordpress. Both of these are free, can be easily installed from your hosting services control panel (such as from within GoDaddy or Hostgator), have a ton of free and pay templates and plug-ins, and are easy to update. Determining whether you want to use Joomla or Wordpress is dependent on the goals of your site, the ultimate design, and personal decision. Even though Wordpress was originally designed for Blogging, it is very flexible and can be used as a general website too. With either of these, take the current site models that you created in the previous step and start looking for templates that come close to your design. Then find a contractor who can help you tweak that template to your specific needs. Here are a few of the best resources to use: - Joomla.org - free website CMS. - Wordpress.org - free blog CMS. - Wordpress.com - Hosted affordable blog/website CMS. - odesk.com - contractors: designs, programmers, graphics, etc - elance.com - contract ghost writers - istockphoto.com - low cost license free photos and images - 99designs.com - contest based affordable designs (You create a contest for a fixed price and many artists submit their designs . You then pick your favorite.) - Templatemonster.com - Affordable website templates - There are too many resources to list here. These are the ones that I have found are the best and have heard good things about from other web developers and internet marketers. Feel free to look around and see what else you find. Making the right selections up front will greatly simplify the entire process and make the site easy to maintain for the long-term. I will be sending out resources to help with traffic generation, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Have fun with this process! Helping your business Thrive NOW! P.S. I hope you have been benefitting from this MPN Thrive NOW! newsletter, the MortgagePro News website, the Teleseminars and all the other resources we have been providing for free this past year. If so, please show me your appreciation by dropping me a quick email testimonial. If you include a link to your website, I will post that on the MPN site. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it 
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