Website Building Process- Part 2 of Case Study 1

Step 1- Decide  Website purpose - This we can take direct from the owners requirements above

" To have an Internet presence to refer existing customers to via email and on stationary and business cards. In addition, to attract new customers (worldwide) who may be searching for such services on the Internet.

There is no requirement for online payment mechanisms as all payments would be by standard invoice and check."

Step 2 Website design and build. This splits into several main area we need to decide on.

• Website Fonts
• Website Logo
• Website Layout
• Tables or CSS
• Navigation
• Number and name of pages

Taking them in order

Fonts:  After lots of research for my very first websites I standardised on Verdana sans-serif size 2 (10pt). All of my Websites use the same font and so do most other Internet sites. I insert the following HTML in my web page template to accomplish this.

 <FONT face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">

LOGO: The company doesn't have one a so I just used the company name. Using Microsoft paint I made a graphic for the company name.

The graphic was 840 *120 pixel gif file. A smaller version is shown below:

A few things to note about the logo.

First it isn't very artistic. I'm not a graphics designer and so I make no apologies for it. You can use various tools to create your logos or even have them made ( see website Logos).

However for the time being the logo isn't so important and it can always be easily change at a later date. What is important is that you create it as a .gif file (or small jpeg) and that it contains the company name and or website name. I have also included the telephone. Fax and email details in the  graphic.

This last point is very important as it makes these details available on every page but as they are part of a graphic they are hidden from email harvesting tools used for spam.( see hide email address for more details).

WebPage Layout: I currently still use tables for layout and so I will use a standard table 840 pixels wide. The table will be split into 3 parts- Logo, left navigation and main body as shown below (note 720 should be 840):

Navigation: I normally use both left and bottom navigation the left navigation is contained in the left column and the bottom navigation sites inside the main body at the bottom but separated from it using an horizontal line as a spacer.

However because this is a small site I will only use left navigation.

All navigation uses plain text links and standard colours.

Number and name of Pages: The site will have 6 pages including the home page. They are:

I've highlighted two pages in the table above. the index (home page) and the samples page. This is because I want the search engines to find them and rank them I have used descriptive titles and where possible page names and not just home page or samples page.

That covers most of the design now we need to decide on the domain name and the hosting provider.

Domain Name: In this case it is an easy decision we will use the company name. Because we have and are targeting international customers we will use a .com extension. Hence the domain name is:

abccompany.com

Because there are no special website requirements like PHP/database  support almost any provider will be capable of hosting this site. We only need basic hosting services.

When choosing an host I have a short list of 3

• BlueHost- USA based Professional website hosting for $6.95 per month. Incredible feature rich package including Wordpress.
• Site Build-it- Complete website building, hosting, promotion package. To learn more about site build-it start with the site build-it review on this website.
• One and one -UK based sites

The site-build-it option I would recommend for larger content driven sites. In this case I only have 6 pages and am unlikely to expand hence the choice is between any of the others.

For this site because the client was UK based I choose a UK company (One and one).

I always use the same hosting provider for both hosting and domain name and so I ordered the domain name and basic hosting from 1&1.

Step 3: Website Promotion: The client doesn't want any massive promotion, only to be found by the search engines. To accomplish this we need to do some keyword research and then web page optimization .

The keyword research gave the following keywords

The website was submitted to the search engines Yahoo, Google and MSN using the addurl page. I cheated a little and added it under my resources page (this site), not to boost it, but to get it indexed quicker ( 2 days to get in Google).

On-going Promotion

I also gave the website owner a list of general directories to add his site to and showed him how to locate websites for link exchanges. I instructed him to concentrate at first on his current customers/agents that have web sites.

However he only ever got listed in a few local business directories.

Results

Results on 1-6-2009 are. (site is now 3 years old and has not been changed for three years)

Step 4: Monetize-

Not Required for this site

End of case study 1..