How to Start a Website: First Website Advice

If you are serious and want to know how to start a website that will make you money, then you need honesty and a genuine concern for your success, rather than a commercial attempt to take your cash in exchange for useless information that can be found free online.

It is significantly easier to start a website than others might have led you to believe. I taught myself without any of that online help, but it took me several years to get the hang of designing a good website; not good looking, but a website that was good working. I am not going to attempt to provide you with all my knowledge in one article, but will give you some guidelines and an insight into what you have to take into consideration when designing a website - design, build, same thing - it's just semantics.

When you go through these adverts, all they generally offer is to show you how build a website. How you use your website to make money or run a business would be regarded as an extra at extra cost - if they were actually able to help you with that. If you want the theory behind their ideas, then think again - you won't get it. The same applies when picking your domain name - you have to do that without any advice on how to get the best name for your site unless you pay more.

Don't confuse starting your first website with a search engine optimization (SEO) company. The two tasks are different. And the only SEO firm you should deal with is the one listed at #1 on Google. Why? Think about it! What is their purpose? What is it that they are suggesting they help you with?

Starting a website is easy, and is only the beginning: here is what else the firm you choose to help you build your first website should also offer you:

1. Website Design

There are many ways to design a website, and many online web design companies will offer you all the fancy bells and whistles: ignore them, because Google doesn't like many of them, and while the Flash animation looks good, they attract surfers wanting entertained rather than the serious buyers that you want. The company you use will certainly not tell you that.

2. Website Optimization

Both the design and the content of your website should be optimized so as to impress Google when it visits you. Google uses mathematical formulae to work out how relevant your web page is to the search term used by its customer. It will analyze every individual word and phrase your page and calculate their relevance.

When a Google user uses a search term (keyword or phrase) to find information, your web page will be listed according to how Google has listed you in order of relevance for that search term. As an example,this article might be listed for the keywords 'website' or 'how to start a website' and where it is listed, or even if it is listed at all, will be dependant on how it compares with other web pages in the way it handles the information in provides on the keyword/phrase.

3. Ease of Optimizing

Most services will optimize your site for you, without telling you how it is done, so that you have to pay all over again if you add another page - each page has to be optimized separately. However, at least one I know shows you how to start a website by letting you do it yourself by means of templates and analysis, telling you where you have gone wrong and what to do to put it right.

4. Website Promotion

Your website should attract the attention of the search engines. Website promotion is very important and there are ways to bring your site to the attention of search engines (let's call them Google to save space). Your site has to be put in Google's face for it to visit, and the worst way to do that it to use search engine submission sites or software. Google will tend to list you quicker if it finds you naturally rather than if you submit your website using a submission service - by following online links.

This can be done free even though there are many firms that will charge you good money for it. They might try to tell you how to start a website, but will also try to sell you their other services. Close your eyes to firms that offer submissions to dozens or even more search engines - there are only four main search engines that offer their results to the rest to publish. Do not submit your site to the search engines: instead use something such as article marketing to offer a link to your site that they can follow naturally. That is by far the best way.

5. Analyzing Results

Having designed and optimized your site you should analyze your results. There is plenty software available to do this for you, but some of it is expensive. A worthwhile hosting package will come with traffic analysis software includecd.

Finally, when you are designing your first website do not just jump at the first web host you come across, anbd certainly don't choose the cheapest. The price you pay relates to what you are paying for, and while a $5 a month web host seems good, the $300 host can save you having to spend another $500 to purchase the software to make your site work as it should that is included in the dearer package.

For more advice on a website design system that works check out How to Start a Website for a foolproof way of building a site that makes money

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - How to Start a Website: First Website Advice