Site Buildingweb-site-building

If you’ve followed along and gone through the process of Market Research and Keyword Research, you should now have a topic and a list of keywords that you want to focus on. It’s now time to put your plan and research into action by building a website.

In this section, I will discuss some important factors you should look at when building and developing your site.

Outline before you go online:

Before building your site and take it online, the first thing you should do is to outline your topic and sub-topics. This means organizing the topic with all the related sub-topics.

For example, if your topic is “weight loss”, the related sub-topics could be “weight loss plans”, “weight loss programs”, “weight loss exercise”, “weight loss tips”, “weight loss diets”, etc..

website-structure-1

Another example: if your topic is about Internet Marketing, you can structure your site as follow…

website-structure-2

You can treat each sub-topic as a category and target one or more subject areas in each category. Of course you can also add new category as time goes by.

This org-chart structure of organizing your topics into category is very flexible and appeals to the search engines. For example, if you want to add a new topic or subject area (that is related to your main topic or theme of course), you can add it as a new category or as a sub-topic of existing category. For example, in the “Traffic Generation”(*) category, I can add new topics such as “SE Traffic” and “PPC Traffic” under it.

The structure also appeals to the search engines (SE) because SE will follow links from page to page. All the pages are accessible from the top level (home page) and you can also link related pages to one another to form what is known as internal cross-linking structure. This allows the SE’s robots (site-crawling software agents) to find all the pages in your site easily.

Ok, after you have outlined your site structure, the next step is to write content/articles for each topic and sub-topics and turn them into web pages (HTML pages). Now, you will need a site building software to build your web pages of course.

Side note: Don’t be scared of building a website even if you know nothing about HTML. In fact, you don’t need to know HTML to develop a professional-looking site!  Gone are the days when people build websites using HTML code. Today, most people are using site building software and this software is as easy to use as your Microsoft Word.

There are many site building software available. The most popular ones are Dreamweaver, FrontPage and XsitePro. If you’re new in site development, I recommend XsitePro. It’s the most user friendly and easiest to use among the three. And XsitePro is the least expensive one but it’s as powerful as Dreamweaver which is the most expensive among the three.

All site building software comes with complete manual and tutorial. In XsitePro, I only need to spend 1 hour to go through the tutorial and after that, I can build website like a pro.

Last but not least, when building a website, don’t worry too much about the design and template of your site. All site building software comes with some simple but professional looking templates or designs. Just choose a simple template!

The most important ingredients for your site are the contents. Remember: people are searching for information on the Net, they’re not looking for entertainments. So, cool graphics and animations are not important unless of course you’re building a showbiz or entertainment website. If you’re building an Information-based website, focus on quality CONTENT!  It’s the most powerful component of your site to attract visitors.