What should I put on my web site?

here are four basic concepts that make up a good web site. Firstly, your site should be visually attractive (i.e. well laid out; eye pleasing color scheme; carefully considered use of Typography). You don't want to chase new viewers away by assaulting their eyes with a glaringly hideous barrage of conflicting colors, advertising banners, and unreadable text. Next your web site should be easy to navigate. Your viewers should not have to hunt around to find the information they need. Another element of success is found in the speed at which your site loads on the viewer's browser. Even today, in the age of broadband connections, an extremely large number of people still connect to the 'net via dial-up MODEM. These people get very impatient waiting for a bunch of huge graphics to download to their screen. Many won't wait and will never see your site at all. Most importantly, your site should have valuable, recently updated information. This is the only way you will get viewers to bookmark your web site and return time and time again. Not only will they return, they will also tell their friends to check out the site. If you pay attention to these four factors your chances for success will greatly increase.

There are basically four ways to make your web site visually attractive. The most obvious one (and the most expensive) is to hire a professional design company to lay out your site. If you decide to go this route you will need to have all or most of your content ready to go before they can begin. Don't just pick the first design company that pops up on an internet search. Be sure to shop around and look at example sites produced by each company. The next step down the expense ladder is to purchase a site template. Templates are a great way to get started quickly. At the very least you should expect to get a basic Home page, any images used in the design, and a CSS style sheet that defines such things as color scheme and fonts. CSS style sheets are tricky to read and I highly recommend that you get a good book to gain the skills needed to begin tweaking the layout to suit your own needs. Moving further down the expense spectrum brings us to free web site templates. Actually using these is exactly like using purchased templates. The template provider may require that you keep a link on your site notifying viewers of the template source. Free templates are not really a bad way to go, though the available designs are often pretty basic. This site began with a free template that I acquired from Bravenet.com. I have tweaked it to the degree that it no longer resembles the original so I now claim it as my own design. Finally, you can do it yourself. To pull this option off you really need to know your stuff, or at least be willing to learn. This may first appear to be an inexpensive route to take but if you realistically factor in the time you will spend working on your web site you will probably find that it is the most expensive. If you are like me, though, this cost can be "written off" to training.

The phrase, "easy to navigate", is one of those fuzzy kind of sayings that can mean almost anything. What is easy for one person may not be for another. This sounds a little strange when you consider that all web site navigation amounts to, really, is clicking on a link and/or button to move from page to page. What could be easier? You would be amazed at the personal web sites I have seen where the creator has taken this simple idea and made it nearly impossible to move around in their sites. Hidden links or links that only show themselves when the mouse pointer rolls over them may seem "cool" but they end up costing you money. Many people will arrive at your Home page and just look at it. They won't let there mouse "wander" around the screen looking for these hidden "treasures". They will see nothing and they will leave. Keep in mind that a lot of your viewers could actually be color blind. If there is not sufficient tonal contrast between a button and the text written on it - they will not see it. There may even be people that find there way to your site that are completely blind. These folks are using a type of browser that literally reads the site content to them. If your links are buried deep in a bunch of nested tables they may just give up and move on.

Making a site load quickly to a viewer's browser is incredibly important. It is not that hard to accomplish either. If you lay out your web site using CSS Style sheets, use as little HTML as possible, and optimize your images you are pretty much good to go. Now if that last sentence made no sense to you at all then you have some things to learn. CSS can help you establish certain rules that your pages can use to display the content on the page. These special rules have names so that they can be applied to various HTML tags without having to repeat all the rule details. This, ultimately, means less HTML which results in a faster loading page. When it comes to images what people often fail to do is to properly optimize their images. Many people think that just because they are using a .jpg image format they have fast loading images. This is not necessarily the case. When you use image processing software to save an image in .jpg format you are given an opportunity to adjust the amount of compression applied to the file as it is written to your disk drive. As you apply more and more compression to an image the visual quality of that image decreases. (It is a little strange in that the smallest numeric setting results in the most image compression.) When you edit your images you have to experiment with this compression adjustment to find the lowest setting that still results in an acceptable image. Along with the concept of using optimized images you should also be careful not to use any unnecessary images. If you need to fill some empty space sometimes a block of color (applied with CSS) will suffice.

Now we come to the most important element of a good web site - Content. Where does this come from? Your options are to write it yourself, pay someone to write it for you, or you can use articles already posted on the internet in Free Article Directory sites. There are pros and cons to acquiring articles from free article sites. On the plus side, doing so can take a lot of pressure off of you especially if you feel that writing is not exactly your forte. You certainly can't argue with the price - FREE is just about in everyone's budget! Your site will also benefit from the wider range of knowledge that you will gain by using work from many different authors. Now for the minuses. Even though you save time by not writing the articles you will spend (lose) time searching for and reading articles to select. Believe me when I say that you must read the articles before making a selection. Failing to do so could make your web site (and, by association, you) come off looking stupid. Some of the "authors" you will encounter out there are folks who have no business writing at all. Another problem to consider is that you probably will not be the only web site featuring any given article. Because the articles are FREE for everyone you end up with what is called, "duplicate content" by Google and the other Search Engines thereby running the risk of actually being excluded from results returned by a relevant keyword search. The first two options are ultimately the best as they guarantee you will get unique, interesting content targeted perfectly for your web site.

That's all there is to it. Don't get discouraged - take each item one at a time and you will have a winning web site before you know it.

Don't forget that there are places that can also provide nice add-ons like Guest Books, Mailing Lists, and User Polls to make your job even easier. Two of my favorites are listed below.

Additional Resources

f you are really interested in becoming a successful Affiliate Marketer you can't make a better purchase than the Rosalind Gardner handbook offered below. The advice is authentic (born of real life experience) and extemely valuable! I know that she has saved me hours of futile effort and steered me in the right direction on more than one occasion. As an example, if I had not read her book this website would have been called www.weekend-web-site-home.com. Don't those hyphens look cool and make the name easier to read? That's what I thought, too. But Rosalind set me straight. People will remember the name but they won't remember the hyphens. So when they tell their friends about this site they will tell people to go to www.weekendwebsitehome.com. Which would send folks off to look at somebody else's site - NOT MINE!

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