Making your own website takes time and effort, especially if you need your site to be user friendly, manageable and most importantly, look professional. With so many websites out there, trying to get yours ahead of the game takes time, skill, hard work and a bit of know how. First of all, you need to acquaint yourself with a good website building programme to ensure that the very fundamentals of your site are correct from the word go, otherwise trying to embellish a site which is poorly designed or constructed will get harder and harder as time goes on. This will hinder your website’s traffic, rankings and user interaction. Let’s look at a few things to consider:

Use a good website builder

There are plenty of website builders out there, but as easy it as it is to buy one, it’s hard to know which will give you a website you can be proud of. End product is everything. A particularly effective website builder is SiteMaker. Before buying your website builder, it’s advisable to try out a free download. Namesco offer a free download on SiteMaker so you can try it out before buying. SiteMaker is one of the best website builders out there, with numerous templates to choose from, up to 2000MB email storage, unlimited number of pages, widget libraries and up to 5GB of monthly bandwidth. It is user friendly – especially for novice website builders – and allows you to log on and edit your site anywhere in the world. Well worth investigating.

Graphically speaking

Another sign of a great website builder are the graphics used. The graphics you choose to implement are often ruled by your chosen website builder but you can make sure that what you put on your site is graphically great. Choose pictures and images that complement your site. Don’t use too many in fear of overcrowding your site and, if you can, embed them with appropriate search-engine friendly tags.

Content matters

Your website can look as professional and well-designed as you like, but the mark of a truly great website is the content which you put up. Although this comes as part of post-site production, content should be considered from the off. What content will you need? Will you write it or will you outsource it? Quality content is the key to a successful website.