build your website

Your website is the life and soul of your Internet presence: it MUST appear professional and act professional. Otherwise your visitors will not feel confident enough buying from you.

Desidn Your Website

To give your website professional look you don't necessarily have to spend thousands of dollars and hire a web designer. Well, it doesn't mean you can't hire professional to do the work for you if you want to, and you have enough budget. But if you're beginner with limited budget you can always design it yourself or buy a web template.

Designing a website yourself is not a difficult task, especially with the variety of excellent tools available these days. To build a website you'll need HTML Editor. There are two types of HTML Editors: WYSIWYG and text only. WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") software allows you to design your pages graphically so you can immediately see how things look on the screen.

WYSIWYG editor is much easier to handle for beginners. The excellent and frequently-used WYSIWYG software (and personally my favorite) is Microsoft FrontPage 2003. The obvious advantage of using this software is that you do not need to learn HTML. It's easy enough for beginners and can save you plenty of time.

The text only editor requires you to write all of the HTML code yourself. Arachnophilia is an excellent HTML editor: it's FREE and provides you with various tool bars and wizards to make your coding process easier. It also supports more advanced features like CSS and Javascript.

Regardless of what type of editor you use, basic HTML knowledge would be very helpful in your website building process as well as in website maintenance. Learning HTML is not as hard as you may think. You can find more information and helpful resources in our Webmaster Tools section.

But sometimes designing a website can be too challenging or too time consuming for a beginner. In this case buying a web template (pre-made web page) would be the best option. The template includes a complete layout with graphics, but does not include any text, and you can add as many pages as you need by copying an existing one.

4Templates website or Templates Resource have a huge selection of professional web templates for any budget. All you need is to choose the design you like, and start building your site right away.

Basic Web design rules

Whether you're designing your website yourself or choosing a template, there are several rules to consider when creating a Web site:

don't use every cool trick you can find!

Most of them are not as cool as you think. After all, you want your website to look professional, be user friendly and load quickly. Flash for example is slow-loading, and can cause problems for some of your visitors, especially ones with a dial-up Internet access.

Keep in mind that many of your visitors still don’t have high-speed Internet connection. Unless you’re a graphic designer demonstrating your professional skills, avoid using Flash presentation. Most people (including myself) just don't have patience for long flash presentation or simply find it annoying. Same thing with java clocks and menus with sounds.

1 2 3 >>