How to set up a website

Posted on 16 Jan 2008 at 17:33

Now you've chosen a host and registered your domain, it's time to build your site. Start by sketching out its structure on paper. This needn't be anything more than headings and ideas, but you should aim to note down all of your pages and show the relationship between each one to make sure you don't end up with broken links and orphaned pages. Identify the key pages that will appear in the top level of your menus, and decide how subpages of these should be represented when you transfer it all to the screen.

Only when this is done should you start to consider the design. Refer to our guide to web design here, and build yourself a standard template that you can roll out across your site. Make sure that the name or logo is positioned prominently at the top of the page, and that you have a menu linking to all of your top-level pages - the main sections - in a clear form running either left-to-right below the header or top-to-bottom in the left-hand margin.

How you divide what remains of each page is up to you, but avoid wild variations when moving from page to page. Take a look at how the BBC site presents a massively varied spectrum of pages, covering kids, health, cookery, news and more with just a couple of very similar templates. Do the same with your site and you'll give the whole thing a professional, unified finish and help your audience find its way around. This is more important than you might think, as frustrated visitors will quickly turn elsewhere, and there are a million rivals just a Google away.

Don't be tempted to publish your site with blank or broken pages, and never present your visitor with a "coming soon" or "under construction" graphic. That's so 1994. If you haven't finished working through the map you drew at the outset, you're not ready to put it online. However, if time is pressing and some parts can go live before the rest, at least do your visitors the courtesy of commenting out your broken links using after. So, the link to the missing page about yourself would be commented thus: . Once you've constructed the "about" page, remove the comment tags and the link will reappear.

If web design is beyond your abilities, check out www.steves-templates.com, www.templatemonster.com and www.freewebsitetemplates.com for a range of free templates ready for tweaking.

Back to 'How to switch ISP & web host'