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By Daniel Will-Harris
OK, so you want to build (or rebuild) your Web site. Good for you. I mean it. The Web is full of opportunities and you should take advantage of them. Wait, let me rephrase that, you'd better take advantage of them.
Before you leap into action, you need a plan (lest the leap you take is over a cyber-cliff). You need to know what you expect to accomplish, what your site visitor will get out of it, what it's
going to cost you in terms of time and money, and how you're actually going to build and maintain this new beast. A good Web site isn't just an on-line brochure (though it can be); it's more like your personality in pixels. It's the face you
present to the world and your virtual office or storefront. Web sites can do a lot of things—from presenting information to giving you a direct line to your customers so they can purchase whatever it is you're offering.
The very first question you need to ask yourself before you go any further is why? Why do you want to build this site? What do you mean to accomplish? You may be secretly thinking, "because everyone else is doing
it," (though you wouldn't admit this to anyone now, would you?) but that isn't the right answer. Do you want people to:
If your goal is not clear, then there's not much chance your site will get good results. If your goal is clear, everything becomes easier—planning, design, building, maintaining your site, and finding success. Content, commerce and interaction
There are three basic kinds of sites: content (information), commerce (sales), and communication (interaction with people). It's becoming more usual for sites to combine the three: to provide information and products or services for
sale and to use the site to interact with current and potential customers. In fact, most commerce sites provide plenty of content as a way to attract visitors to the site and give them
information they need to help motivate them to buy, then use the site to help provide support. A site that only provides information is going to be different than one that has a main goal of selling, or one with the main
purpose of communication. So even if you plan for your site to do all three things, you still need to set priorities and decide which aspect is most important and how they're going to interrelate and support each other. Yes, it can be like
assembling a puzzle, but once your goal is clear, then it's easier to fit the pieces together. A site can be as simple as a few pages of text and graphics or as elaborate as the database-driven front-end for a complex
catalog or on-demand content system. They can cost as little as the time it takes you to make one or as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on outside designers, builders, writers, and artists hired to create one for you.
Who will visit and what will they get?
A common mistake is for people to know what they want the site to do for them, but not for their site visitors. Then you end up with a site that makes you happy but which everyone else on the planet could care less about.
It's vital to remember that a good site isn't just about what you want. It has to be about what your site visitors want—otherwise they have no reason to visit, or at least no reason to visit again.
Put yourself in your visitor's shoes and ask: "What do I need to know?" "What do I want to know?" "What is the problem I need a solution to?" Your answers to these questions will
help you determine the information you need to provide the right content for your Web site. Providing your visitor with solutions is good for you and your site. It encourages more people to visit, and to visit
repeatedly. On If you haven't done so already, write down your goals. Put it on paper (or at least on screen). Make it short and sweet, yet also as specific as you can. How do you plan? There are lots of ways to start—choose the one you're most comfortable with. You can just use a pencil and some paper if that's easiest, or if you're working with a group you might
want to get together and work with a whiteboard. Your word processor is also good for this kind of planning, especially if you use the outlining feature (which you may not even have known existed). To read more about using
outlining to plan a site,
To read more about planning a site, What can I expect to get out of it?
If your goal is simply to inform people on a topic, you want to create a content site. You can expect that your message can reach anyone connected to the Internet, any hour of the day,
any place on the planet (and now even to some people in midair). The trick, of course, is not so much getting your site on-line, but getting other people to your site. This means that marketing has replaced distribution as "the hard part." If you're thinking that your Web site is going to earn money for you, then you have to be realistic about it. Right now, most
Web sites don't earn money for the people who run them. That doesn't mean yours can't, it just means most don't. There are several ways to make money with a Web site. The most direct way is to use the site to sell your products or
services. Many Web sites do this, indirectly, by acting as a marketing device, a kind of on-line brochure—but with more depth than most brochures (because space is not at a premium). But it is possible to actually sell your products and
services on-line. But the amount of work you get from your site will depend on how many people visit your site, how good your site is
(remember, this directly reflects on you), and how useful it is to your visitors. If your site doesn't look good or contain good content, then it's not going to make you look good. eFuse.com
is here to help you make your site as good as it can be—and thereby make you and your organization look as good as it can to the world. So what's realistic? Well, like any other new venture, getting
people to visit and use your site takes time, and you need to allow three to six months just to start getting traffic. During that time you're going to have to do promotion and marketing
for your site, because just putting a site on the Web doesn't guarantee anyone (other than your mother) will visit. Will your Web site be a gold mine? Possibly not. Will it be a good adjunct to your existing business, help promote your
business so you get more work, and eventually become a majority of your business? Quite possibly. Ah, good question. The answer: It all depends. If you build it yourself, it will cost you the price of good Web-building software such as NetObjects Fusion (though
there are free ways to build a Web site, such as using Microsoft Word, or Internet Explorer's FrontPage Express, or Netscape's Composer), plus the cost of your time creating the content and design. Then you need to You also need to create a budget for marketing—otherwise you could have a great site that no one ever finds or sees. Marketing is something you can do yourself or something you can hire a professional to do. Sometimes a do-it-yourself site is enough. Especially if you use a site building product such as NetObjects Fusion, which does so much of the work for you and even provides professionally designed templates if you need them (to see
some of these styles, But if you've never done this before, you may want to consider
Budget and resource constraints Don't forget that your own time, and that of your employees (if you have them), is valuable. You will probably need help from all departments in your organization. Sometimes that means you (yes, you, the one wearing all the hats and doing all the work), and sometimes that means getting cooperation from other departments. Getting groups of people to work together is always a challenge, but if the goals of your site are clearly expressed and for the good of your entire organization, then it should be easier to get everyone to cooperate. Building your site: The best laid plans
OK, so you've decided to build a site, you know what you want your site to accomplish, and you've set aside time and money to make it a reality.
Next question: 'Who's going to design and build this site? Equally important: 'Who's going to maintain it? Sites aren't static—even after your site is built and on-line, you have to continue to refine it. Creating a site isn't something you do once and you're done
with it. It's a cycle.
Web sites are not like traditional publications; they're more like places. They aren't static—good sites are always changing and growing as you learn what works and what doesn't based
on feedback from your site visitors and your Web site logs (files that keep track of how many people visited which pages and for how long). In the real world, if everyone who came to your office had a
hard time finding the receptionist and just left out of frustration, you'd remodel your office. The same is true with the organization and navigation of Web sites. In the real world, if people cringed when they saw your wallpaper, you'd
probably change it. The same is true with Web design. So it's important to look at a Web site as a process rather than as a fixed end result. Can you really do it yourself? As software gets more sophisticated, site building becomes easier. Programs such as NetObjects Fusion really do provide
so much help that virtually anyone can create a full site (not just a single Web page). NetObjects Fusion helps you organize, design, and build a site, even providing specially designed styles to make your site look professional. eFuse.com provides a new site template each month for
different industries, such as real estate, travel agencies, hotels, restaurants, and more. To see these templates, click here
. You (with the help of good software) really can do it by yourself. But if you don't have the time, or you understand the value of experience, you'll want to consider hiring
someone to help you. How do you find professional help?
Like any other new task, you can spend your time (and money) learning how to do this all yourself; you can find software such as NetObjects Fusion that can do much of the job for you; or you can find and hire someone with the
experience and expertise to do it for you. Finding Web designers is not that difficult, because unlike traditional media, most sites have design credits with links to the people or companies that designed them. If you see a site
you like, look at the bottom of the page for the designer's name and link, then visit their own site, which should link to other sites they've designed. You can also e-mail the Webmasters of the sites you like and ask them about their
experiences working with the designer—contacting everyone involved is simple. The cost of professional services varies greatly based on the experience of the person or group you hire and what part of
the country they're in. For professional site design, you should expect to pay anywhere from $1,000 to $50,000 (or more) depending on the complexity of your site. Some places will design a site and let you build it yourself. Others will do
the whole job, from concept to creation. The price will vary based on the size of your site and the technical complexity. A simple "content" site will cost less to produce than a site with dynamically generated pages and e-commerce features. As a Web designer myself, I always try to develop a site so clients can maintain it themselves. Make sure to ask anyone you're hiring how they work once the site is up, and speak to
their clients to see if they were able to take over maintenance themselves. In the real world, if people don't stop by your office or store because they can't find it, you'd take out ads and do other forms of promotion. The same thing is true on the Web, only
on the Web, it's no longer about "location, location, location" and all about "marketing, marketing, marketing
." There are things you can do yourself, such as ensuring that your site is listed on the most-used search engines. For more information about your site and search engines,
If you have an in-house marketing department, they need to play a part—ensuring that your Web address appears on everything you do and making sure the publications and people in your industry know about your site and its services.
For example, I just bought a plant at a nursery, and the label on the pot included not just information about the plant, but the So whether you're building, or rebuilding your site, take the time to think it through thoroughly before you start. It takes less time and money to do it right the first time than to have
to redo it later. For a good place to start,
Illustration: Ingo Fast´s Technology from www.artville.com |
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Daniel Will-Harris is a designer and author whose work can be found on his 
