Content

Before you start creating your web site, before you even go anywhere near the computer, you have to ask yourself one thing. What is your site going to be about?

That probably sounds stupid, but many people (and large companies) decide that they want a web site without having a subject matter. So what we end up with is thousands of personal homepages introducing us to people's family, pets, neighbours etc. All fascinating stuff to the person who created it, but of little interest at all to anyone else.

So decide what your subject matter is going to be. The most obvious examples are hobbies - no matter how obscure your interest is, it's almost certain that someone else on the Internet would be interested in reading about it. In fact, the more obscure the more likely it is that your site will attract visitors - doing something that's been done a million times isn't an easy route to popularity. Although obviously we are not suggesting you should not do something just because it has been done before.

Check it Out

Once you've decided on a subject matter, do a little research with the search engines (try Google or AOL) and check out some sites that already exist about your topic. Find out what is well catered for and look for gaps that you can work on. The more unique you can be the better, but you don't have to be the only site on the Internet talking about your topic. There are plenty of people who will want to see every site on a subject.

The next step is to draw up a list of what is going to be on your site - vague ideas are fine at this stage.

For example, when we decided to create code-warrior we thought about what we wanted the site to do. Ultimately it was to teach HTML, so the HTML Tutorials section was created. We also wanted to deal with the non-coding aspects of web sites, so we came up with Sitebuilder. Working this way, we finally came up with the main sections of the site.

Literally that's all you need to start with. You can get more detailed later when it comes to making the individual pages.

Now here's the important bit - keep hold of that plan throughout the design and construction process.

Now we can move on to the sites design.