Website for free – game plan
Before you build a website by your own, or in other words, for free. It is good to have a plan of action.
Get ready
Anyone who has ever shopped knows that it’s good to have a list. Otherwise, you will chaotically wonder between the lanes walking countless extra miles. Shopping that could take no more than fifteen minutes, will last at least an hour. And despite all that time, after leaving the cash register, it turns out that you forgot about half of the things. Imagine that you need to buy a watermelon and eggs, nobody in their right mind would put eggs first into a shopping bag. The same case is with the website. You need to have a game plan. Otherwise it will be a mess.
Faster doesn’t mean better
Often happens that the desire to finish and publish website as soon as possible force us to cut corners. It usually means starting development stage before creating the content. But remember that it’s much easier to design a new website for existing content, than to modify existing design to fit the new content. Therefore, the more you will plan and think things over at the beginning, the easier it will be along the way.
It doesn’t matter if you’ll use some free template based on free cms system, or you’ll design and develop whole website from scratch. Beginning work without a solid plan, in most cases will result in wasted time and shoddy effects.
Where to start?
Sit comfortably in a chair or at your desk with a blank piece of paper and a pencil. Try as hard as possible to answer the following questions:
- Why do I need a website?
- What’s the goal of my website?
- What tools will I use to build it?
- How much time I have to spend?
- Who are my customers?
- Who will edit and add new content to my website, and how?
Honest answers to these questions will help you prepare a good sitemap. You will also be able to determine if your site will be updated frequently, and thus whether it should be based on the content management system. If your site will be visited by elderly people it’s worth thinking about using readable fonts in larger size. If you don’t have much time or you’re not so good in coding, then it’s better to base your site on one of the free systems, eg. WordPress.