Comrie Software Solutions: Website Development

Website Design

As with any project a website needs to be planned and documented thoroughly from beginning to end before construction begins. This will avoid wasted time, money and resources.
Before you begin... Planning & Design Construction & Publishing Website Tips and Tricks
Before you begin...
The first thing to do is determine exactly what your Internet Service Provider offers and what services it supports. Consider the following questions: Does your ISP offer domain hosting? How much web space is provided? Will it be enough to support your web site? Can additional web space be purchased? Does your ISP provide statistics regarding traffic to your site? How secure is your Website? Who owns the content on your web space? Does your ISP support Active Server Pages, CGI Scripting, Hit Counters, Shopping carts etc? Does your ISP support Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions? Do you have easy access to changing the content of your web site? Is your ISP reputable? Will it still be online in six months; two years? How much will it cost YOU if your web site goes offline?
Planning & Design
Your website will always be a work in progress, because of this, it should be structured to easily accommodate change. With a proper foundation in place, changes will not damage the integrity of your site. Broken hyperlinks and missing images are very common on the internet. Many web sites are a starting point to an internet journey with no pathway back to where it began. A web site should have a central starting point, kind of a mission control command center. From there you should be able to branch out to anywhere on the internet and come back to the initial point with a keystroke or mouse click. Getting someone to your site is important but keeping them there and getting them back again is equally as important. Having a button that will add your site to their Favorites is a great way to get them back, even if your site is the path to someone else, next time they will start on your site. A clean, well organized site is very important. Too much information on a page gives visitors no focus. Break your information into a hierarchy: start with the categories or headlines and give them hyperlinks to the details. Avoid bells & whistles. A technologically impressive site is not necessarily a good site...don't sacrifice speed and content for glitter and fireworks!
Construction & Publishing
With a proper design in place your website will have a strong, flexible foundation. From there it is a matter of applying content and graphics to the framework. There are many WYSIWYG web developing programs available today, FrontPage and Home Site are very popular. These allow you to publish directly to you server, if your web server supports this Otherwise FTP (file transfer protocol) is a fast, proven method of transferring your web files to your server. Most importantly you must publish you website to search engines. This is done best the old fashioned way.... Add yourself manually to each search engine, and constantly check your position in the search ranks. Or you can pay a service to submit your site to search engines, this can be very effective in achieving traffic to your site.
Web Site Tips and Tricks
Most major search engines will list a .COM site before .NET, .ORG or .CA. You will be better off using mycompanyonline.com than you would with mycompany.net etc. Keep this in mind when registering your domain name if you are going to be counting on getting a high rating on searches. Let your meta tags be the power of your search rating. Choosing the correct keywords is a major factor in achieving a high ranking. Include miss-spelled words (example: Microsft) and similar versions of your company name. People who don't know about your company are not going to type in your company name. They should be able to find you by what you do or sell first, then your company name!
Websites built with frames look good and are easy to navigate, the drawback is that Search Engines and Web Spiders cannot index them properly. The default page used to access your site will have no hyperlinks in it to be referenced by the search engine. The work around for this is to add a No Frames alternative to your website site on the default page. This will give the search engine something to index, problem with this.... The links in the search engine will not match the layout of your frames version. It will however give them a link to the frames version if they wish to bookmark your site. Better yet..... add a button to your site that will bookmark it for them!!!!
Always keep in mind that your site is accessible by the entire world. Ask yourself if anything on your site will break a law in a foreign country? If someone wanted to sue you for any reason, what jurisdiction will the claim be settled in? Would you be able to go to Japan because someone claims the content of your site is similar to theirs? Cyber Law is a growing concern and one that should be taken seriously by anyone placing information of any kind on the Internet. For more information on this topic I recommend http://www.albertalawyers.com.