Websites form an integral part of a person's life on either side as a site owner or a user. The are countless web sites that exist today which probably hints that building one isn't much of a back breaking job. Nevertheless, building a web site does require resources of time or money and at times would even demand both. So it's important to get it right from the scratch. Here are a couple of basics tips that would come handy when you're at it:

1. Planning

Though a very clichéd term, it is vital for any web site builder. Planning would help you focus your work better right from your site's purpose, target audience, structure, content to its promotion and maintenance. As web sites do occupy web space and are even charged accordingly, proper planning will help you cut down on unnecessary experiments and repetitions saving your valuable time and hard-earned money.

2. Designing

This will serve as the first experience of your site for the visitors. Needless to say that it will be the last experience. Designing would involve giving substance to your site right from its lay out, content, beautification. It's always best to create a balance between simplicity as well as flamboyance. While one would enhance your reader's navigation experience the other would help retain their interest and increase your site's recall value. Designing would consist mainly of the following:

· HTML: HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which allows you to create pages of text, images and other content that, can be viewed through web browsers. While there are many HTML editors readily available, knowing the basics of HTML would help you create your ideal web-site and empower you to deal with ordinary issues.

· Graphics: These would help make your site look attractive. Graphics or images can be created by using a vector drawing application or a bitmap painting program. An important tip would be that different images take up different loading times; hence it would be best to choose your graphic options wisely without compromising on quality and user's convenience. Moreover, lots of graphics will slow down site's uploading speed and might turn away customer. Thus don't go mad about adding more and more graphics.

· Other Aspects: These would include the fonts; resolutions, back grounds that would also help determine the attractiveness of the site.

It would be advisable to check your designs on the popular web browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, if not all of them.




3. Domain Name

This would be a unique name that would be used by the user to refer to your site. Domain names have a corresponding IP address that needs to be registered in order to be listed on the World Wide Web. It is advisable to select a name which is in sync with your business or any other matter. Moreover, .com, .org etc have different meanings associated with them. Therefore, chose the one which fits your purpose perfectly.

4. Web Hosting

Through web hosting,the web-hosting service providers display your sites on their servers on the basis of certain charge. You could avail of different packages in this namely free hosting, shared hosting and dedicated hosting. Make sure your service provider is a genuine one. If you got hold of a wrong service provider problems like server down, delay in e-mails and so on will catch you and that too repeatedly and frequently.

5. Promotion

Web Site Promotion is required in order to step up your site's traffic. No matter how good your site is, promotion is imperative. Promotion is possible through means of link exchanges, mailing lists, paid advertising and submitting your site to popular search engines. Link exchanges can be attained with other web sites that would display banner, ads of sites on either web site. Mailing Lists, though a good way of promoting your site should not amount to spamming users with mails advertising your web site. Paid advertising is a good option if you plan a big site and sport an accommodating budget to go with it. Of-late affiliate programs have catch-up a lot of craze amongst the site-owners especially the small and medium sized ones.

Besides above, there are 'n' number of ways to promote your site. Choose only couple of them and not all.

6. Search Engine Optimization

The best way to ensure search engine optimization would be to pick on appropriate key words from your site that search engines could use. Most search engines display results of a search on the basis of the number of times the keyword is repeated in the site. More the number of key word occurrences, higher the ranking and vice versa. Moreover, never ever forget to write body copy and meta-tags of your pages.

However, SEO is a technical task thus it won't be a bad idea to hire a consultant. Lot's of people performs excellent search engine optimization and they charge only a nominal fee which you would be able to recover in a flash. Please see, it has to be done right from day one.

Last but in no way the least, a good site needs to be constantly maintained, updated and monitored to distinguish it from the countless others that clutter the web. If you are very much involved in other activities and cannot give time to your site, outsource it but for god sake don't keep them as a storehouse.