Creating your Bands Web Site
Building a website can be a very difficult or easy task depending on the
approach and the amount of preliminary work that you do.
Here a few questions to ask yourself in the brainstorming stage of starting your own
website:
- Why will someone want to come to your site?
- Who are your competitors, and what can you offer that they don't have?
- Who is your target market?
Write down your answers and save them with a properly named file and date, by writing
these notes down they will help later on, when writing your sales
copy, and/or developing a business plan.
Design Considerations
You have to choose what kind of webpage to develop. I favor basic html pages using jpgs
and gifs just because they don't need any additional plug-ins to run
the webpage, increasing the size of your viewing audience. This choice
will really depend on the purpose of your webpage, and the target
market that will be reading it.
So now comes time to start gathering some content for your site, this is what
makes up the body of the website, and whether it will make or break
its success on the Internet. Take some pictures of your own unless
you plan to buy image royalties, and in some cases you will want
to show case your own unique product that only you will have a photo
of.
Writing some articles on the topic of your website will come in handy for drawing
traffic into your site. For example, if you were to start a website
selling mountain bike parts, than you would want to write a few
articles on local trails to ride, and new technologies of the cycling
industry. This will draw in targeted traffic of cycle enthusiasts
to your site. Another consideration is If your website visitor can't
read all the website has to offer in one sitting, they will be enclined
to come back for more. Just make sure that the content you want
them to see is the most easily accessible.
Take some time to think about how your website will be structured.
An important rule of thumb is always have your content available
within 3 clicks of a mouse. (Your visitor is always one click from
leaving your page so don't give them anymore reason to) If the content
is buried very deep in the website it may never get read. Designing
these link structures are crucial for the user compatibility and
graphic layout of the website.
Keep researching
Don't stop after reading this article, be prepared to do alot of research,
the web is constantly changing and so is the information on the topic
of your website. Visitors will stop coming back if you never get around
to refreshing the content on your pages. Use articles to draw in visitors
to your website. People tend to read what interests them and if there
in your site reading and interested then you've brought in your specified
target market, making a sale alot easier, than waiting for an impulse
buyer.
Now that you have a few ideas rolling around in your head, its
time to decide whether you are going to hire a designer or design
the page yourself. Webdesign can be a very costly experience so
if you are on a budget I recommend making the attempt of designing
it yourself.
|