Planning Your Custom Web Site Design

With the ever-expanding popularity of the Internet comes e-commerce, the exploding trend of doing business on-line. Perhaps you have witnessed first- hand the infinite power of communication, information, and marketing afforded by this awesome tool.

But how do you get from the basic concept of your own web site- to a professionally designed site, up and running on your own domain? The following information may helpful.

Planning Your Web Site

Some questions you need to answer before developing your own custom web site design are:

Will it be a personal web site? Personal web sites usually focus on family and friends, or things such as hobbies, recent news, or "fun" things.

Will it be for conducting or promoting business? On the internet you will find an endless variety of business web sites, ranging from basic customer information type sites, to enormous ecommerce web sites like eBay or amazon.

These mega web sites require extensive inter-relational databases to enable the various aspects of the site such as on-line credit card purchasing or customer service forums to function properly, and track and record each transaction.

In addition to personal or business web design, there are educational sites, political or viewpoint sites, support or encouragement sites for any given subject, blog-type sites, and the list goes on.

Once you have decided what type of web site you want, it is necessary to develop a domain name. You should give much thought to this; the domain name should relate in some way to the subject of your web site. For instance, if you are selling baseball cards, a good name would be baseball.com, or ballcards.com. After deciding on a name, check with one of the online registries to find out if the name is available, or whether it has already been taken.

Solving Technical Obstacles

Once you have successfully selected and registered a domain name, you are ready to begin your own custom web site design.