Web Design on a shoestring budget
If you want to have a website for your business, please follow the Guidelines below:
- Write down the things you want on your website
- Decide on your domain name
- Get your domain and hosting provider
- Do it yourself tips and tricks
- Use a good designer
- Start to build the content of your website
- Start to promote your website
- Learn from your Statistics and mistakes
Write Down the Things you want
This may sound simple, but it’s not…
Think about what your visitors will need on you website, things like a contact form, an about your company page, what products or services do you want to promote, how will the site look like, etc.
What will you be writing on your website!
The last one is mostly overlooked by website owners and they start thinking about it once the site is up… this however is crucial to succeed with your website.
From the content idea’s you will get to the richt structure of your website and to wards the next step, conversions!
You visitors need to be wright at home if the find your website and you really want to make sure that your website reaches its goals.
So write down what those goals are:
- Getting more customers asking for information,
- Getting more customers to ask for a Quote
- Getting more sales from the site via eCommerce
- etc.. you get the general idea, full in your own targets
Your Domain and Hosting
Next thing to do is decide on your domain name and register it, plus get some place where your website will reside.
You domain name would probably best named like you business is. So if you business is called IBM, it would be nice to have your website on IBM.com…
That is already taken, but you get the idea. People will look at your business name first if the are searching for you.
Having that domain will look more professional than a keyword stuffed one. If your company name domain is already registered by someone else, you could try to buy that domain, but you could also check if instead of a .com domain you want to get an .net, .info or another dot extension that would fit.
An other alternative would be to extend your domain name with your primaire keyword.
So think about things like IBM-Machines, IBM-Software, IBMSoftware, just to give you some ideas.
Once you have your domain figured out, register it which you can do in combination with your hosting.
Sometimes you can even get your domain for free if you sign you for a hosting package.
Affordable hosting will set you back between 4 to 10 dollars a month, based on your needs.
Mostly you will have to sign up for one year and pay for that whole year upfront.
You really want to have a reliable host that also have a good support if you run into any trouble.
Uptime is also a key factor, since you want to site to be reachable by your potential customers.
At the bottom of this page you will find some links to Programs and Hosting providers that really give you value for your money.
Your CMS system
There are some great Open Source Content Management systems that you can use for free.
Most of the Hosting parties mentioned below will have those systems ready for you in there control panel and you just have a one-click install of the systems.
You could go for Joomla, a well know and widley supported. if you need help, you will have no trouble finding someone to help you out.
WordPress is mostly considere a Bloggin platform, but with some decent plugins and some template tweaking it can be turned in a real CMS.
If you want to use Wordpress, go check out the site about WordPress as CMS.
Drupal is also free, but has a more steep learning curve. If you have no expirience with a CMS you will need some time to learn this system.
If you want your website to have a Blog integrated, or have an active community forum, Drupal is great because it is all integrated into one system.
Finding someone to help you with Drupal might turn out somewhat more difficult than with Joomla or WordPress.
You can find the links to the above mentioned systems at the bottom of this page.
Get a Good designer
Hu? I did not want to spend a lot of money on my site, since I just got started!
Oké, thats fine, but if you can spare some money to get a great template for one of the systems mentioned above, spend it on a good designer.
Just make sure you look at his portfolio first and ask him if his templates will work well in search engines!
If you dan’t want to, or cannot afford a designer (yet) just search in Google for the layouts the fit the system have choosen.
For Joomla search for “Joomla templates” for WordPress you use the term “WordPress Themes” and Drupal uses Themes as well, so that would be “Drupal Themes”.
You can even include the term “Free” into your searches and you will find a lot of great looking website layouts to start with!
Open Source Content Management Systems:
Top SMB Hosting Providers:
