Before you design your site -

Choose domain names, hosting and design software.

1) A name for the site.
The name of your site, or 'domain name' is simply a user friendly address, that acts as a pointer to web space (where your web pages sit - web pages are documents just like documents on your hard drive). This domain name will be used by people to type in to their web browser to find your site.

How do you choose a domain name?
First start by thinking how the domain name is to be used.

If you are promoting a particular type of product you might wish to have that product name in your web site domain name. For instance if you construct web sites, you might include this fact in your domain name to make it clear what you do - for instance our domain name is www.best-web-site-design.co.uk.

You needn't be too worried if your company is not the same name as your domain but you can also consider buying your company domain name to point to the same site. This can be a useful thing to do where, as with our domain name, we wanted to have what we did in the name but would not expect someone to type this in to a browser, as it is too long winded. So we have an alternative domain name that only goes on our letterheads and is given to phone callers. Try saying your domain to someone to see whether it is too long winded!

NB: Do not register the same site on search engines under different names: Buying and submitting multiple domain names for the same web site is considered a breach of many search engines' rules and therefore can get your site banished from their database. So if you are purchasing multiple domain names, make sure it is for the right reasons or for different sites!

2) Somewhere to place your pages on the Internet.
Without web space and a web page sitting on this, your domain name will be of no use.

Choose web space carefully. Many sites will not require a huge amount of web space. This site only uses 25 MB and there are over three hundred pages plus images etc., plus database driven web pages. Try to speak with the hosting company before you buy web space. If you cannot do so then think twice before you do. If you cannot get in touch when there is a problem, your site could be down for hours or days unless you call a premium number. Click here for more information regarding our web hosting.

Decide what features you require.
E-mail
Check out e-mail pop 3 is used for dividing a web site's e-mail into different user accounts

If you are on your own, or all e-mail comes to one place you probably will non need loads of pop 3 accounts. Usually now all e-mail will come to one address by default - check with your provider.

CGI Scripts - these are used for forms, guest books and other useful features - check that you have CGI scripts on your space and that if you do not, you at least have CGI available. Forms are one of the most common requirements we come across - for users to send messages to your e-mail directly off the web page.

3) Software to produce your site.
We use a mixture of tools to produce web pages. Some coders still prefer to look at the code directly but it is often more efficient to use a web site tool to produce your web pages - and you do not have to understand html! These packages differ in abilities and user friendliness.

We use Dreamweaver and our own web site builder as it provides an efficient environment in which to produce pages - using a mixture of DTP style interface and code views so that you can apply changes to the page and to the background programming as necessary.

Do not feel that you have to be looking at code when writing web pages - you wouldn't do so if you were using a DTP package to write a letter - and it is often unnecessary to look at the code. As you produce pages you will gradually learn useful HTML knowledge that helps you with producing pages more efficiently.

Be careful of cheap packages or those being offered 'free' with operating systems or DTP packages, as they may initially produce pages for you but these may have poor code, be difficult to edit and not have many features that become more useful as you produce a more complex site.

4) Software to edit your images
You will need to edit images for your site unless you're set on producing a site which is purely text based. In producing images, the better packages allow you to produce a variety of image types to add to your page. The most efficient types of images should be used for the page. Do not simply accept a large image to place on the page as this is annoying to users. Pick a package that allows you to produce GIFs JPEGS and to save in web compatible formats.

Again, we use a professional package, Photoshop, as this allows huge flexibility for us in generating 'optimised' images that load quickly when a user visits the page. However, you can use irfanview.com - where there is a free utility to allow you to edit and change images to be more efficient for the web.