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Create a Website – The 4 Phases of Site Creation
There are numerous steps in website creation, but no matter what type of site you will be creating, these four phases will be used even if you are making a professional, easy web site or any type in between. The four phases to create a website is to plan, build, create, and design.
1. Plan: By starting with a plan for your web site it could help you have less aggravation later on. Some questions to help with this planning stage could be: Why do you want to build it? If you are on a budget, how much will you set aside for registering a domain, obtaining hosting, purchasing software, or any other tool that you may want to use? What is your theme going to be? Who will be your targeted audience? If you are creating a site for profit, is the market too saturated? When do you want to have this site on the internet? How much time will you put into the site, not only to make it live on the Internet, but after it is, how much time to keep it updated?
2. Build: Time to start building the pages. How many pages do you want to start with? Which one will be your main page? Start adding some of the keywords you will be using. Many web designing software programs can make many pages quickly but you still need to put in the keywords, content and everything else to make it optimized for the search engines.
3. Create: Writing your content can be done at the same time that you are building a page, or you can do a few pages at a time and then go back and add the content to it. Much of the information you may be adding could already have been half written in your planning stage.
4. Design: Much of this phase may be done when you went through your planning, building and creating phases. The designing part of the site is not only the header, footer, and navigation menus but also the color of the background, text color, should you use flash or not, checking spelling and grammar, are the pages you built too long or wide, the font style and size, and making sure the images are clear. If your pages have a lot of information (ads, banners, content, etc…) grouped together, does it make it difficult to understand?
Some of these phases may be limited to you because of the software you are using to make your own web site but having a good plan to start out can help with that problem. You don’t need to buy expensive software to make a great looking site. I am sure you can find ways to work around problems that come up. If you do get to a place that you are not sure what to do, take a look at your competition (if any) and see what you like (or don’t) about their site or find a forum and ask questions to help you find answers to your problem.
No matter which order you take these four phases in, once you decide to create a website, they could keep you from making drastic changes later on or even scraping the whole project after you have put a lot of time and energy into it.
Website Design – The Three Most Important Elements
When it comes to website design, there are three very important elements that must influence the process of developing a site which can be viewed on the Internet.
1. Customer Satisfaction.
Although this should be common sense customer satisfaction does not always take a front row seat in the priority department for many agencies. It seems that in the era of our fast paced society a lack of customer satisfaction is the status quo. Companies often rush from completing one job to the next and in the process they somehow skip steps, miss promised timelines, or fail to meet agreed upon priorities. Which comes to my next point.
2. Listening to the Customer’s Needs
The old adage that the customer is always right has been somewhat lost. Clients generally have an idea of what they want to achieve with their websites. Usually, for businesses, it is to bring in new business or increased revenue. What they often do not know; however, is how to accomplish this online in the form of their website. This should not really be a surprise, because often this is not an area of expertise for many entrepreneurs or company executives. This also does not mean that the web development firm hired to complete the website should just run ahead without consulting the client on their needs.
It takes a practiced skill to help the client identify what they want to accomplish online and what the look and feel of the website should be. This initial groundwork will certainly go a long way in understanding the overall goal of the site, and how to best achieve this within best design and development practice.
3. The Ability to Communicate with the Client
This skill of helping the client identify what they want to accomplish online can be best identified as communication. It is the process of exchanging information through various means to accomplish an understanding or shared meaning of ideas. The ability to do this well only comes with skill and practice. A good analogy of this process would be the traveller looking for directions in a foreign place using a different language. The traveller is like the website design firm looking for directions from the local: the client. Like the local who may or may not know the directions, the client may or may not know what they are looking for in their website. A good project manager in the web design firm will use all their skills to gather the information, and help the client along in their journey of conveying what they want in their website.
These skills may include interpersonal projection, asking for clarification, using probing questions to seek further details, and evaluating and explaining the process thoroughly. The client needs to know sooner than later what is possible with the budget specified, and how modifications during the website design process can increase the cost to develop the website.
Although there are many other elements that contribute to excellent website design, web designers or their project managers must be able to provide these three main aspects for the web design project to be on a successful track.
Adsense – Free Website – Paid Website Or Blog
Adsense are the google ads that you quite commonly see on website and the owner of the website gets paid whenever someone clicks on those ads.
It is possible to earn a very good income using Adsense ads on your website but how much you earn can all depend on how you set your website up.
Should you use free web hosting to set up an Adsense website?
Free web hosting should not be used for an Adsense website for two main reasons.
The first reason being that many of the free web hosting providers will actually have their own ads placed on your website. This is the payoff for having free hosting that you will have the hosting companies ads on your site.
It is actually against Googles terms of service to place ads on a webpage that has the hosting companies ads on that page already. So if you have a free website which already has ads on it, and you place Google Adsense ads on their you can very likely have your Google account suspended.
The second reason is that a free hosted website does not look all that professional. You are restricted to a certain degree and will more than likely have it written somewhere on your pages that your site is hosted free.
If your aim is to make a good income online then you really do need to have a professional looking website so your customers will feel like you are a professional and can gain a trust in you and what your website is telling them. If you customers like your website and gain a trust in you, then there is a good chance of them coming back to your site and possibly clicking on your ads.
Should I use a blog to earn an income with Adsense?
You can have Adsense ads on a blog and many people do. A blog is like an online diary that you can update with any information you like and as often as you like.
It is much easier to get a higher page ranking with a blog than it is with a website, so your blog could be gaining a decent amount of traffic much quicker than perhaps a website could. So in this way, it is a great idea to set up a blog and have your adsense ads on it.
You are a little restricted with your layout and pages of a blog compared to an actual website, but you can still place a good number of Adsense ads onto your blog and if you update it regularly and get good traffic then you will make some money doing this.
Is paid website hosting the best option for using Adsense?
I believe having a website with paid hosting is the best option to earning a good income using Adsense.
With paid hosting your site will look very professional. You can add a lot of content to your site which will bring you ads that are relevant to your websites topic.
With your website you can set up many pages of related information and have your Adsense ads placed on all pages.
You will have to work a little harder than with a blog to increase your page ranking and your traffic and it could be a good idea to have a blog also linking back to your website and this way you will have your Adsense ads on both your website and your blog.
Definitely use a paid hosting service for your Adsense website and your earnings will be significantly higher than with a free website or a blog.