Essential Stages in Website Development

An Online project can be broken down into 4 essential stages-  

1. Initiation

2. planning

3. Execution

4. Monitor/Control

All the above steps are critical to the success of a website development project however most of the time people skip this part. I would like to emphasize here that planning and Research form the base of any project. While ‘research’ will aid you in making an informed decision, planning will help you minimize the risks of your project.

Actually, it is very easy to get carried away by all those catchy phrases that you see on internet- ‘Make a Website in 30 minutes’, ‘Fire your boss’, ‘Earn Six figure from home’, etc however please don’t rush to launch your website. A good understanding of  the business objectives, sound business plan, careful researching of the segment/methods, rich content and presentation style and innovative product promotion can alone ensure success for your venture. I will talk about these in greater detail in the next few posts.

I can tell you one thing upfront- the complete process is time consuming and down right boring!  At the same time, I can attest by experience that following it would save you a lot of trouble and rework later. Even if you launch your website today without giving any thought to the above considerations, I can assure you that sooner or later you will have to go back to the ‘Drawing board’. 

Note: All posts have been arranged in descending order with the most recent ones displayed on the first page. Please browse through categories if you experience difficulty in navigating through the posts.

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How to upload ‘Themes’ to your WordPress blog?

This video answers three questions related to ‘themes’: 

1) How to upload themes to a WordPress blog? 

2) How to change the theme of your WordPress blog? 

3) How to upload theme to a WordPress blog using Bluehost cpanel?

Simple Website Design Tips

Since makeawebsiteyourself.com caters to a class of “Do it yourself” entrepreneurs with limited programming knowledge, I would just keep it simple in terms of what constitutes a good website design. I must tell you that that it may not be possible for everybody to incorporate all of it however I suggest that you keep them in your mind and try to get as close as possible.

Navigation:

1) Visualizing how a visitor would navigate from one page to another is the key. Think what a visitor would look for when he lands on your website and how easy you can make for him to locate information. Don’t make them click around too much. Information should be made readily available.

2) Links to the About Us, Privacy Policy and Contact Us page should be included on every page of the website.

3) Include a link to get back on the ‘Home’ page on every page of the website.

4) Include a menu bar on every page. You can have a menu at the top and/or bottom (if the page is too long), left or right side of the page.

5) Navigation link should be on both bottom of the page and on the top or left.

6) Don’t make the page too long by stuffing in a lot of articles on the same page. If the article is long, insert a link [WordPress plugin] to go back to the ‘Top of the page’.

6) Home page should include a logo in the top left hand corner and a short tagline that identify what your business does. There should be some kind of information available to let your readers the objective of your website.

Text:

1) Text should be large enough to be read. You can use the following-

Arial- 12 or 13 px

Verdana-11 or 12 px

Take a look at this example webpage. You can’t read the text without straining your eyes.

2) Never put text on image or textured background.

3) Don’t make your pages too wide. If that happens, most visitors won’t be able to see the whole page unless they scroll sideways and this is definitely annoying. Most computers in the world have a screen resolution of 1000 x 768 pixels which means that your visitor can view your website up to 1000 pixels without the need to scroll horizontally and this should be good enough limit for you. 

Color and contrast:

Please use color and contrast wisely on your website. If your website is content driven, I would advise you to have a white back ground. Colored back ground may distract your visitors.

The color of the text should be in contrast to the back ground color and at the same time the color scheme should be correct. This would ensure easy readability for your visitors.

If you are highlighting a sentence ensure that it is highlighted in color which is not perceived as loud. Avoid too much of highlighting in a page as it is perceived as amateurish.

Links and hyperlinks should preferably be highlighted in blue as this is the general trend. If they happen to be in any other color then make sure that trending remains uniform all through the website. This way people would know where to click and would not get frustrated.

This reminds me of another point- make sure that the links are not dead. I mean that when a visitor clicks a hyperlink he expects to be redirected to the target location of the url however if the url turns out be an inactive one, they can get very frustrated. It gives them an impression that the website has not been properly maintained.

Page Load Time: 

Please ensure that your website does not take a lot of time to load up on a user’s computer. Some of the studies have shown that 1/3^rd of the users abandon a website if it takes more than 8 sec to load up…still counting 15 sec and close to half of the potential visitors have abandoned the website for good.

How do we do this?

Compress all image files. There are lots of tools available to do it for you. Please don’t have too much of animation, flash files, movies or sound files loaded up on the website. It gives a cluttered look to the website and increases the loading time.