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.