Although this step reads like simply applying common sense, a surprisingly large number of website designer-developers miss out on this very important step. As a new domain administrator (we are assuming YOU are the one who is ultimately responsible for the content, features, and services offered in your website), you have to have a very clear understanding of what your website will be, what it will offer, and who are its target visitors. Is it an online business where visitors can buy your products? Is it a hobby page where you provide information about one or several of your personal interests? Is it a family homepage where you can inform friends about your latest activities and share photos of your family vacations? Is it a blog where you collect your thoughts about a particular issue that is important to you? Is it a corporate website providing portfolio and contact information with sensitive content? Is it a discussion forum about a topic of general interest?
While a website can be a combination of any of these and more, before embarking on the daunting task of actually implementing it you must have a very clear idea of what your website is and what it isn’t. Remember that websites that are simple, clear, direct and uncluttered with irrelevant flashy gimmicks will provide the best experience for your visitors. Think carefully about exactly what kind of information and experience your website is to provide and you will already have won half the website building battle.
Choosing “how to build” your website depends on your needs, including not only the website requirements (what content and features it offers and what types of visitors it is targeted to), but also your requirements in terms of time, budget, and skills you have available. For instance, the development method you might use to build a small website with a few simple information pages will be very different if you’re building a website with lots of content, features, categories of users, and many visitors. If you already have web scripting and software coding skills and have a lot of time available for development of your site, the methodologies you use are most likely completely different from the ones you would use if you are a small business owner without IT experience who needs to launch the site in two weeks.
Broadly speaking, there are four kinds of ways in which you can build and launch your website.
Each method, of course, has its advantages and disadvantages:
Writing an entire website yourself using the basic languages that make the internet possible allow you the greatest amount of control, flexibility and power. However, doing so requires solid software development skills, serious discipline, and typically a large amount of time for all but the simplest of websites.
Commercial products that automatically generate your website’s backbone code for you are often intuitive and easy to use, have great documentation and customer support in case you get stuck, but cost money, may have licensing and use constraints, and the features may be incompatible with other products.
Open source tools are free to use and encompass a wide variety of even obscure requirements, but often need to be modified at the source to get them to do exactly what you want, and documentation and support is sparse and often confusing.
Hiring someone to do it for you is often the quickest and easiest way to get exactly what you want, but it costs time and money, and you need to communicate with your consultant on a regular basis until the website is launched.
Combinations of the above are of course also possible. For instance, you might design the look of your website using a commercial product, hire a developer to implement the website, and then use open source tools to maintain it. Or you might buy a design template (which specifies the “look” of your website) from a company, implement the website features yourself, then hire an employee to maintain your pages as your website grows. The method or combinations of methods to use on your website is something only you can decide based on your budget constraints, skillset, website requirements, and time availability.