So you’re finally taking the plunge and building a website for your company or for yourself; that’s the first step.  Unfortunately, it’s also the easiest one.  Building a website is a surprisingly big undertaking, and it’s important that your site reflects you and your business well.  Therefore, there are a few things to consider before and while you’re building your website.  The first, of course, is defining your target audience.  You need to be able to clearly define who you want to reach with your website, why you want to reach them, and why they should care that you want to reach them.  This usually means providing fresh, attractive content or a product that they’ll be interested in using.

The second thing to consider is coming up with a catchy domain name.  When it comes to selecting a domain name, there are 3 simple rules:  Keep it short, spell it correctly, and make it easy for people to remember.  An overly long or complicated domain name will frustrate users and make them not want to visit your site.  It also helps if your domain name has something to do with your business, such as having “repair” in the name if your business deals with repairing things.  Proper spelling is also important, because if you try to be fancy and come up with a strange spelling for your website, it will also discourage users from visiting.

After you’ve come up with a concept and a domain name, the next step is finding a website host.  There plenty of ways to attack the web hosting problem, so while on the hunt for a web hosting company, take into consideration the needs of your business and your site.  Determine the amount of web space you’ll need; make sure your website has enough bandwidth capacity; take into account the speed of the web hosting company’s servers; evaluate the effectiveness of the company’s technical support system; find out what features each web hosting company offers; and last, but certainly not least, choose a company nearby.  This plays a factor in reaching your target audience.  If your target audience is in Germany, for example, it makes sense to choose a web hosting company based in Germany to host your site.

Finally, it’s time to examine the content.  If you’re building a relatively static website that won’t be updated regularly, you can turn the job over to a web design company and be done with it.  However, if you’ll be updating your website on a regular basis, look into a content management system.  A content management system will make it easy for you to update your website without any deep knowledge of website design.