How to get started, if you’ve never had a website
If you want to move forward with your plan to “get a website”, what do you do first? Here’s the approach I take with everyone who seriously asks me with this question: Begin by forgetting computers and the Internet (just what you wanted to hear, yes?), and then…
Unavoidable questions
Sit down in a quiet place, with paper and a pencil, and a block of free time. Start drafting answers to the questions BELOW. Yes, you can avoid these questions, for now, but you then get to deal with them later. Guess which is the wiser idea…?
- Who will be coming to my site?
- Who do I WANT to come to my site?
- How will they find out about it?
- How often will they be coming?
- What will they be wanting, when they arrive? How do I know?
- What do I have to do to make it possible for them to leave satisfied with their visit?
- How do I want my site to promote or support my business?
- How can I best use my site to promote my business? (This is not the same thing as the previous question!)
- Who/Where is the best source of good information about how to create my site?
- How will I get the initial content for my site?
- Over time, how will I get new content for my site?
- How will I be evaluating the effectiveness of my site?
- How long will I be maintaining my site?
Keep it going…
Every one of these questions are quite likely to become important at some point in the life of your site. Some will take a while to answer well (weeks, months, even years). All are worth revisiting, repeatedly. All should be seriously addressed before you even think about things like webpage layout, photos, colors, and all those things which people usually first think about.
You will discover that many writing and design questions all but answer themselves if you’ve dealt with the questions above FIRST. Of course, you can always invest in a site, then encounter these questions late some dark night, and then start over. I’ve done that a few times, and it wasn’t fun or cheap. You can do better.
Getting to the right stuff: Your content
After you’ve harassed yourself for a while (and you should do just that!) with all or most of these questions, then what? Start outlining the essential content you will produce, in some fashion, to meet your most important objectives for the website. (For more on this, see First steps in getting your content ready for your website)
The last time I did this, I knew I wanted to provide “notes” to some of the key topics about which I educate many of my clients, and put them somewhere they couldn’t be misplaced (my clients are often rather forgetful). That alone could have made a decent website. But I also wanted to validate myself in several ways, to people who I met, or who heard about me from clients. Those two simple objectives have remained primary for me, and I can connect everything on my site to them.
I recommend that you aim for the same goal – a clear relationship between your objectives and every page on your site.
Assessing your support needs
Next, you have to consider what you can and cannot do, to get the site launched, and get help for the latter. The better clarified you needs are, the more likely you’ll find someone appropriate to meet them, and within budget. This, too, is a design problem, and it’ll cost you if you do it badly.