Getting Started on your First Web Page

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Getting Started on your First Web Page
Welcome to Developer-Online,
Developer-Online is committed to helping you construct your first web page and getting you
online as quickly as possible. Creating your first web page can be a daunting and
confusing task. Where do I get started? What should I do? However, it does not have
to be this way, creating a web page can be a fun and rewarding experience if you just
follow a few simple guidelines, which we will outline for you here.

The first thing that you should do when getting ready to construct your first web page
is to define it. What do you want your web page to do? Do not just start constructing
your page, really think about it. You should think about how you want it to look, what
information you want to provide to your perspective customer in order to persuade
him to buy your product or service rather than going elsewhere.

Be sure that you organize the page well, think of your Home Page like the Table of
Contents page in a book, it is there so that your customers know where to go in your
site for their particular needs, or just to familiarize themselves with your product.
Lastly, when defining your site you should do your research. Always visit your
competitions web site to see how they have organized their site, so you can make
yours better, whether it is just including more information about your product, or
simply making a better designed site.

Now that you have given some serious thought to how you want your web site to
look, and what you want to include in it, you need to think of a name for it. There are
various approaches to finding the right name for your web site. The first is to make
the name logical, for instance, Nike’s web site is nike.com. Another approach is to
make the name memorable so that your customers can type it in without thought, the
name does not have to be descriptive of the product you sell, for example
amazon.com sells books. Further, you should keep the name as short as possible so
that it is easy for your customers to type into the url field.

Now that you have your web page named and given some thought into how you want
it to look, here are some pointers for building your site. If you have pictures on your
web page go over them first with a photo editing program, like "Photoshop".
so that the customer’s browser does not have to crunch them.
This will also speed up the download speed of your page so that the customer can view quickly
without having to wait for large picture files to appear on the screen.

One of the most annoying things for people surfing the web are pages that take a
long time to download. All those fancy graphics will not do you any good if instead of
waiting for the page to download the viewer closes his browser and goes elsewhere,
so consider going light on the pictures and heavy on the information content.
You should also put some serious thought into what color fonts you are going to use,
and the background color as well. When in doubt, remember that a white background
with black text has been successful for thousands of years!

Your website should also be easy to navigate, all your links should be obvious to the
viewer, and should be self explanatory or have information about where the link will
take them. Try to keep the number of links you have low, the viewer does not want to
spend a lot of time waiting for links to download, chances are, like you, he is pretty
busy! Further, always link back to your homepage in order to make navigating your
web page easier for your potential customers.

Now, before you even open up you Editor, you should construct your web site on
paper. Decide the number of pages you want to have inside of your site, and
determine logical titles for them. Think of any pictures that you might want to put on
each page and where you are going to put them in order to be most effective. You
should plan out your hyperlinks now, as it will make keeping track of them later a lot
easier and save you time trying to figure out why they are not working properly.
Decide where you want to put any buttons that you might create for hyperlinks as
well. Lastly write out any information content you will be putting onto your web page
in Microsoft Word first so you can detect any spelling errors you might have made.
You can cut and paste parts into your HTML editor later.

Lastly, familiarize yourself with some ready templates before you start using it.
Further, you should make a practice page first so that you can get some experience.

It takes two to three months to learn how to use DreamWeaver and at least a month
to learn FrontPage, Practice adding and deleting text, pictures,
and hyperlinks until you can do these actions with ease.

Building a web site is simple and easy if you follow the above steps.
The most important part of the construction process actually takes place before you
open open the HTML editor . Think of constructing your web site like taking a test back in school,
those who prepared before the test probably did better than those who just went in
without even opening their books.

So be sure to prepare before you start, think of the content you want to put in, think
about your links, think about your web site’s name, draw up an outline on paper
before you start constructing the page.