Your Step-by-Step website planning guide

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Step 3: Design and Publish Your Website

If you know html programming or have a good html editing program, you may want to design your own pages and upload them to your server using either FTP or one of the other website authoring programs that will publish web content.

Following are some programs available to develop web pages

• Dreamweaver MX 2004 Try it 30 days for FREE ! (Highly Recommended)
• FrontPage by Microsoft (Good for beginners - Most good hosts include FrontPage Extentions for website publishing)
• Netscape Composer (Comes with the Netscape Browser)
• Microsoft Word (Not recommended)
• Notepad (For those who want to learn html coding)
• Various content management programs. You can find a large selection of programs or scripts designed to help in website maintenance at Hot Scripts.

Sometimes you can have web pages designed and published for less than it costs to purchase a good program to do it yourself. If you will be publishing any graphic images, you will also probably need a good graphics editing program. Even if you have images from a digital camera or ones that have been scanned and transferred to a CD, these images are most often not ready for the web. They will need to be 'optimized' for the web. This includes decreasing the actual size of the graphic and most times reducing the number of colors. This is not easy to do unless you have the correct program to do it.

If you know absolutely nothing about programming or using an FTP program, or have no sense of design, you may want to consider having a professional designer help you with this process.

Step 4: Maintaining Your Website

Once your website has been designed and published, you should decide whether you want your pages to remain the same (brochure websites) or if you need to update web pages on a regular basis. Statistics show that websites that update the content at their websites are more successful, so this is something you should take into consideration.

What Would I Want To Change?

Every website will require occasional modifications and changes - Some sites may require frequent changes. Examples of typical changes to your website:

• Monthly or Quarterly Newsletters
• Special Offers or Sales and Promotions
• Event Calendars
• Employment Opportunities
• Seasonal Updates
• Shopping Cart Products and Inventories
• E-mail address changes
• Location Changes
• Telephone and Fax Numbers
• News or Press Releases
• Addition of Products or Services
• Keywords, Titles and Meta Tag Changes
• Link Exchanges with other websites, friends or business associates

If these are items that you need to implement, plan ahead as to how the changes will be made. Are you willing and do you know how to do it yourself? Do you know someone who has the time and who can do it for you. Another option is to buy a maintenance agreement with a web designer (preferably the one who did your original design) and have them make the changes for you. Vrbwebs.com offers several different levels of website maintenance as well as hourly maintenance for those who only need occasional updates.

For those who have paid to have a website developed and want to perform minor updates without having to learn HTML should definitely consider a product called Contribute. This program allows you to connect to your website and modify or add to the non-structual parts of a website. Contribute is less expensive and easier to use than other full website development programs such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage. It operates similar to other word processing programs that you probably already know how to use. VRBWebs.com is an authorized affiliate for Contribute and you may purchase it right here by clicking the on the image below: Try it for 30 Days - FREE

The really nice thing about Contribute is that it does not allow you to "mess up" the critical areas of HTML programming and embedded scripting. It only allows you to modify content areas. So don't worry about messing it up, and if you do, there is a one-click option to revert back to the original page.

Take control of the content at your website - Try Contribute Today!