Some Fundamental Points on Web Development

Bearing in mind that this site is oriented toward the end user of the web development process, rather than the technicians, this article just touches on the basics of getting a web site made, some of the other more advanced articles might be used to get a feel for the web developer lingo.

What are your needs?

 It's worth taking the time to compose a specification for your web site, examine sites involved in the same business as yours, you can also find template website designs that will fit you business type, see below.

The cost and complexity of a site should be proportioned to your needs.

 The most hassle free, but most expensive approach is to hand over the entire development and configuration process to a web site development specialist. Do some comparison shopping, prices can vary considerably. It's advised to maintain as much control as possible, you should be given all passwords, and domain name control, developers can pad their short and long term profits by providing their own hosting.

An alternative approach to developing a web site is to maintain a more direct involvement in the design and development process, jobbing out the individual tasks to separate services. The development steps might go something like:

• Identify the general site arcecture by examining example sites in a business similar to your, or by locating a template with a suitable look and structure, there are "off the shelf" template predesigned for most businesses.
• Locate and purchase an available domain names, millions are already taken, it might take some imagination to come up with a unique available, There are tools to help identify available domain names. All the domain sellers provide a simple lookup tool, here is an interesting smart tool, Psychic Whois.
  
• Estimate your storage space and bandwidth requirements. Secure a web hosting service, if thre are no technical requirements for microsoft server software, go with a more broadly available and inexpensive (AJAX) linux based server. Go with a big name host, it should show up in multiple host review pages.
• Configure your server account, upload your site .html and image files, or activate a host provided cms system and start filling in forms. refine-test-refine until you have a polished (or at least usable) site.
•  Submit your site to the major search engines and indexes, there are hundreds out there,  but almost all searches are made from the top few.  If your are setting up a marketing site getting this right is an important. Optimizing your site for search engines can improve it's ranking, as the search engines get smarter the effectiveness of just pluging in a bunch of key words is decreasing, having actual useful content is highly valued.  Before hiring a Search Engine Optimization magician (SEO) read up on it, one good source is SelfPromotion.com.

A personal or single page online business card web site might be hosted by a free hosting services most are financed by ads placed on your page, but there are exceptions. Many free hosts allow you to assign your own separatly purchased company domain name.

Small to medium sized sites can be initially hosted with a service in the hotly contended $4-9/mo range. ( Sites may be smoothly relocated to alternative hosts should bandwidth requirements grow). Competetive pressures forcee thses services to increasingly oversell the storage and monthly bandwidth capacities offered, assuming the average actual usage will be well under the offering, to lower operating cost the host will place several client sites on each server system. These package deals include one domain name provided by the hosting company.  It's generally best to buy your company domain name for around $10/yr through a seperate service, like godaddy , to avoid the strings that might allow the hosting company to charge a prermium to retain their provided domain name after transfer to another hosting company. A couple of other hosting limitations to consider: some packages allow multiple domain names, effectively allowing independant sites to be setup on a single account, another spec to consider is the number of databases allowed, bear in mind that each cms-blog aplications like joomla or wordbook require one database per instance.

Should it grow to a high volume site or has higher reliably requirenments it may be hosted on a dedicated server maintained at the hosting company facility. One is effectively paying a lease on a computer, maintence and internet bandwidth. Only large or technicaly savy companies have reason to physacally locate a server at their own premises.

Do you need a web site designer?

 The majority of first time web site owners can probably avoid the significant expense of a custom made, from the ground up web site.  Instead, one of the thousansa of free (search) or commercial (exmple templatemonster ) predesigned website "templates" may be used as a starting point, it's possible that only images and text may need to be replaced. There is still a bit of HTML code manipulation involved in plugging in your content, a web site authoring tool like Dreamweaver may allow one to ake these template modifications without typing any code. An alternative is to use a Content Management Syetem (cms) which allow a portal or blog style of site to be created and updated online with no code programming or development software, it's easiest to choose from the packages offered in your host's control panel. Many of these are free (Open Source) software. An extensive list of samples that can be test driven are located at openSourceCMS. While making it simpler to author, cms systems ave a more right form and limitations than conventional html coded web sites.