Website Components

Regardless of whether you are having a new website designed, or one upgraded and expanded, there are certain components that you need to think about.

Content - When you are adding or writing content, remember to keep your sentences short, concise and to the point. You don’t want your reader to get lost in a long sentence and having to go back to the beginning to understand your point!

Logical flow - This is where the ‘outline’ portion comes in. If you create an outline ahead of time it will be easier for you to see how you want your content divided, how many pages you will need, etc.

Graphics - Remember, it is great having lots of great pictures, but how long will it take the site to download for people who don’t have a fast DSL? Images and graphics that are used need to be ‘compressed’, thus allowing them to process faster when one opens up your website.

Future planning - Do you have long term goals for your site that will require considerable expansion? Will you need to make changes often?

Your site can be designed in a way so that changes are made to only one page and cause all remaining pages to be updated.

Obviously, if you are website savvy, you need not read any further. For those who aren’t it is simple. In very basic terms, if you have a 5 page website and you want to change your header let’s say, you have to go to each individual page and make the change 5 times. If you go the next step and have your site designed in another way, you can go to one page (call it your main style page), make a change, and the change will cascade through all your pages!

Thus the question, are there any future plans for expansion? If you know for a FACT that you intend to have 15 pages or more then it is important that this type of structure be put in place to allow for that later expansion to be fast and effortless.