Steps in Creating a Site
Steps in Creating a Site
Making a Web Site Involves Planning, Design, and Promotion
Making a Website Starts with Planning
When one browses the Net and sees all kinds of chaotic sites and outright usability disasters, he or she will hardly think that this unfortunate outcome is the result of careful planning. Actually, such poor sites are usually the result of lack of planning.
Planning a website might seem a waste of time but certainly it isn’t. Planning allows to think of what to include (and what not to include) in the site and prepare for the design phase. Planning the site could be a formal process (i.e. writing a specification) or an informal one but in any case it is not a step in creating a site one should skip.
Design Is a Core Step in Creating a Website
Design is the core step in creating a site. Here there are two options: to use a website builder or to hire a designer. Both options have their pros and cons and it is up to the webmaster to decide if using a website builder or hiring a designer is the better approach in the particular situation.
Depending on the complexity of the site, the design step can take from 1 hour (for a small site when a website builder is used) to months, or even years (for large, complex sites). The design step itself has many substeps but they won’t be discussed here.
Without Promotion The Process of Creating a Site Is Not Finished
Finally, when the design is over, the time for the last step comes. Inexperienced webmasters might think that making the site ends once the design stage is over but actually promotion is a very important step. In many aspects promotion is a more difficult task than design because it includes many activities and it should be an ongoing task.
The purpose of promotion is to make the site popular and drive traffic to it. There are many ways in which this can be done. Usually search engines and social bookmarking sites are among the preferred free site promotion activities.
The three steps in creating a site are equally important. If any of them is not carried properly, this inevitably impacts the quality of the built website in a negative way.