Do-It-Yourself Guide

Getting Started

If you haven't registered your domain yet, read The Basics of Owning a Website. It will be a large waste of time creating a website only to find out the domain is already taken.

A bad assumption

The worst assumption about websites is that most everyone thinks a website will automatically draw traffic.

Your website will get absolutely zero visits unless you tell someone (word-of-mouth, business cards, brochure), advertise (URL at the bottom of a printed ad, Google ads, etc) or unless you self-promote.

What's wrong with this scenario is the you end up spending all your time marketing your site, not your product.

Figuring out the big picture

The two big questions is this:

• how do you plan to get people to your website?
• once on your site, how do you plan to convince people to buy your product or service?

And even simpler question is this: Imagine yourself a few weeks in the future and your site is finished. Now what?

The reason this step is necessary because it determines content for your site. Content then determines design of your site.