Most people start out with a great site that draws people with content. Content can be anything such as articles, advice, blogs, or computer code. Many viewers visit a site and then come back again if they find something valuable and worthwhile. You won’t get repeat visitors by bombarding them with pop up ads and mouse traps when exiting. Most sites with 100 flash ads also don’t appeal to web site viewers. It is important to make sure you have great content on your site, especially if you are selling a product or service.

Besides having the great content and a good product or service to offer your visitors, it is important to optimize your web site. Search engines rank web sites based on criteria. If you would like to rank higher and receive more visitors then it is important to optimize your web sites to the search engines criteria. Although search engines differ, most people agree that having the proper keyword density, back links and Meta tags can help you rank higher.

Once you have your web site complete and your page optimized, you should look into an advertising campaign. You can choose to advertise on Google Adwords, other people’s sites or a forum that you think reaches your product or services clientele. So to maximize your profits, take a look at the above advice.

Now, having a portfolio does not mean that you will get any customers or clients. It’s whats in the portfolio that brings in the customers. People on the web today are looking for creative and unique designs with a brilliant designer who thinks outside the box. Uniqueness is just what people crave the most on the web today. That being because it is just so hard to do.

Before you put work in a portfolio, or even make one, you should get criticism on your work. What good is a web portfolio with bad designs in it? You should always ask a good friend first. After you get input from them, move to a more public area like a forum or get a professional review done at a site that does reviews like that. Factors like the layout, colors, navigation, etc. are some very important parts of a design that are looked at the most. Take what these people say, and improve your design. Once you have a collection of designs ready, your portfolio will look in some peoples eyes.

Whether you have a site dedicated to only your portfolio, or other content and a portfolio is just some side content, making good impressions on your site is a must. Obviously a potential customer would be looking to order a design from a nice designer with patience rather than a designer who is rude and arrogant. Not only attitude, but grammar is a must have. You wouldn’t want to trust someone “hoo tlks likx dis” would you?

Making a good impression on your site is a huge thing to keep in mind, but what about on other sites? If you go to other sites and scam people out of their money and get banned off forums for bad behavior it will come back and smack you right in the face. Think of it like this: if you are facing a client who is offering you thousands of dollars for a design, wouldn’t you expect some kind of background check? If you were known to be a scammer on one site, it would be something nice for your client to know wouldn’t it?

If you have a lot of friends who know about your web design services, or you have worked with before, try to get their input of your services. This is what is called a testimonial, and they are always great to have on your site. Testimonials show you provide a service, and you have successfully worked with different people around the web. It’s just another thing that can be considered ‘gaining a good reputation’.

Thank you for reading my article!

1. Templates: A template allows you to input your company’s information into a pre-designed format. You can find a template for your website and not have to worry about using HTML. Some sites you can check are freewebtemplates.com; freesitetemplates.com; freelayouts.com; and templatemonster.com. The cost for these start at $0. Of course you will still need hosting, which will run you around $7-$10 per month.
2. Hire a coder: If you want a professionally designed website, you can hire a coder to design it for you. You can find someone who will do it for $200 or less on scriptlance.com; rentacoder.com; webdesignlance.com; elance.com; or guru.com. Be aware that at this price the person may just be starting out so you’ll have to decide if you want to go ahead and spend a little more.
3. Use a web-authoring software package: Mozilla Composer (mozilla.org) and Nvu (Nvu.com) are free web-authoring software packages.
4. Blogs: You can get a “website” on a free blogging site such as Blogger and Wordpress. Typepad provides blogging starting at $4.95 per month. The blog is an excellent place to start when you want to let your customers know what your company is all about. Most blogs have several widgets that allow you to monetize your site and you can also sell you own products from a blog.
5. cPanel: You can create your on website with a cPanel application. Bluehost.com is a web host that has a cPanel. You can also buy your domain name there. Here are the steps for setting up a site on Bluehost:
   • Choose a domain name or transfer an existing name;
   • Once your account is established, login to cPanel;
   • Link into Fantastico;
   • Choose Wordpress
   • Click “New Installation”
   • Fill in the blanks then click “Install WordPress”;
   • Write down the information provided on the next page, then click “Finish installation”;
   • Confirm you installation, including your email address then your website is set up, ready for you to add content.

Although where you begin your web presence may not be the final location of your website, these ideas are certainly a good place to start.

DO pay attention to both style and content. They are equally important and serve their own purpose. Content is what most visitors look for and it’s the part of the site that’s going to make them come back. However, quality of content is not easily noticeable at first glance. Enter: Style. Style will not stand on its own and can’t keep visitors coming back specially if updates to the site layout are rare. Style’s purpose is to attract a visitor’s attention and draw him to the content. They come because of the style, they stay - and come back - because of the content.

DON’T waste your visitors’ time. One common trait of web surfers is that they don’t want to waste time. The internet’s immediacy and accessibility is what attracts most of them. If you waste their time with unnecessary menu animations, flash movies that take longer to load than to watch, and confusing website structure - they will leave. And probably never come back. If your site offers something good, present it to website visitors immediately.

DON’T commit to an update schedule that you can’t follow. If you tell them there’s an update every Monday, make sure they’ll find new content on Monday. Keeping to a tight schedule will inspire a feeling of loyalty with visitors, and at the same time, it can also serve as a means of control. If you have trained visitors to expect new content every Monday, it gives you an exact target on when to avoid downtimes. If you take down the site to implement new features on a Sunday, you won’t disappoint bulk of your readership because majority of them visit and expect new content every Monday.

DON’T use unethical means of promoting your site. Use proper channels like trading links and registering your sites to webrings, search engines and just plain one on one promoting. SPAMMING your URL on messageboards, mailing lists, and other sites’ comment boxes may attract attention at first, but after the initial wave of hits, none of them will be coming back and you just made a bad impression on all of them. Worse, you may even attract malicious surfers who could deface or compromise your site.

It’s a very short list of DOs and DON’Ts, but the tips mentioned above are important and may be crucial in deciding whether your website will stay online for a long time.

However, sketching will help you better understand your thoughts. Meaning, you will at once know if there are any modifications to be made to the web design. Sketches represent your ideas. So, you will be able to show them to your boss or to other people for feedback. Apart from sketches, you can also list any ideas that crop out of your mind. You can either draw a sitemap or mention the names of other web sites that you like. This practice may bring better results if carried out with another people, for example a colleague. Like that, you will be able to get ideas from each other as well as discuss about the web design.

Moreover, an advantage with sketches is that they can be quickly created. They can also be easily changed and transformed in any way you want. Therefore, if midway you have decided to change the structure of the web design, you haven’t wasted enormous amounts of time in front of your computer. You do not have to worry about the quality of your drawing. The important thing is that you understand your ideas and how you plan your web design to be. To come to the right design you can perform several designs and then choose one among the rest. A web design professional will be able to do these stuffs quickly and easily. So, if you are unfamiliar with web design, you may hire a web design company. They will carry out your web design job as per your requirements.

Furthermore, web pages exist in different sizes. So, a good web design will enable people who have different monitor sizes to correctly see a web page. In other words, a web page can change size depending on the computer you use to look at it. Different computers have different sized screens. As a matter of fact, one of the first decisions to take while making the web design is to decide on how big to make the web pages. For instance, if your pages are larger than the users’ screens they will have to scroll to see the rest. But you should be careful to use web design solutions that remove the risk of people scrolling sideways. Thus, it is crucial that you set the correct width for your pages. If it is too wide, then people will have to scroll horizontally. Be sure that your web design features eases the tasks of your visitors as much as possible.

Some web sites do not have a fixed width. These may use web design solutions called liquid layouts which expand to fit the browser window. On the other hand, others can use web design features like elastic layouts which expand according to the text size therefore allowing people to zoom in.

To make your website you will need to do three things. Purchase a domain name, purchase the hosting service and design your website to upload to your hosting server. While purchasing the domain name, try to get a name that contains the main keywords of your website. Or you may simply choose a name that you like.

While selecting your hosting company, look for reliability. Hosting companies will be responsible for the storage of your files and to keep your website up and running. Godaddy.com is a well known, reliable hosting company.

How should your website be designed?

Hire a Designer

You can hire a web designer to do this design work for you. Just ask him to make the site professional looking and clean. The easiest way to hire a designer is to use an auction website like RentACoder.com or ODESK.com. Simply type a description of your project and designers will enter their bids. You will receive many bids from different designers. Check the portfolio and rate of each designer. Select the one which is best for your work and award him your project. After getting your website you can pay him through the auction website.

Use a Free Template

If you do not want to invest to do the designing then you can get some free templates. There are many websites on the internet that are offering free website templates. Just visit these sites and choose the template that you like. Fill in the template with you own content and upload it on your server.

Use Site Builder Tools

Another choice is to use the site builder tools. You can use “dreamweaver” and “frontpage” to make your website yourself.

Characteristics of a Good Website

Simple and Professional

Your website is meant for business, so it must look professional. It should not be over loaded with heavy graphics and lots of flashy banners. Simplicity is best. Try to use light colors. Make a nice header to show your company name and theme. The site navigation must be simple and easy. People should not have any difficulty in searching for a specific page or information, otherwise they will not re-visit your website.

Provide Search Facility

Your website should have a search box on every page to search your website. This will be a great help for the visitors that want to search for a specific product or information on your website.

Build Your Mailing List

Some affiliate programs offer you a website to promote their business. This is the ready made solution. But in this case you cannot build your mailing list. Always try to get your own website where you can easily build your mailing list to promote your business.

Your own website is the key requirement for affiliate marketing. The overall look and feel of your website should be attractive and the site must provide the information for which people are looking for. Provide easy navigation and search facilities to make it user friendly.

Free Graphic Design Softwares

A webpage with no visual design would look bland and will not attract many visitors, so you need an image editing program to create images yourself, or to improve and optimize the ones you already have. MS Paint is serviceable and comes with every windows-based machine, but if you want a more capable program, PAINT.NET would serve as a perfect free alternative to commercial programs like Adobe Photoshop and Paintshop Pro.

Paint.net: http://www.getpaint.net

Free Hosting

These days, free hosting is abundant and easily attainable. Most of them even have shortened URLs to make your site easier to remember. You can use the shortened URLs if you can’t or don’t want to spend money on your own domain name.

While almost all free hosting services are supported by advertisement, they always offer to remove the banners or the ads for a nominal fee so you have the option of an ad-free site when you eventually decide to spend more money.

Free hosting sites:

Freewebs: http://www.freewebs.com

Free Content Management System

If you don’t want to create new html pages everytime you update parts of your site, you may need to install a CMS (Content Management System) in your website. Luckily, there are numerous blogging services floating around the net. They even have an option of hosting your site in their servers and provide you with your own subdomain, which gets rid of your need for a separate Web Hosting and Subdomain service. They also come with layout creation wizards with ready-made layout templates that will replace your need for a third party Website Design software.

So as a last ditch effort, if you’re pressed for time or do not want to go through all the trouble of creating a website yourself and just want to have one, you can use one of the numerous free CMS providers like Blogspot and Xanga.

The examples of free softwares and services mentioned should be enough to help you start your own website without requiring you to spend a single dollar. Using them, you can focus on expressing yourself through the internet without getting bogged down with finances. You can prove that Web Development can serve as a fulfilling and enjoyable hobby that comes free of charge.