Building Your Own Website:

Building a successful website for a small business is not overly difficult, but does require some basic computer skills, a couple application programs, and plenty of patience if you want to build a quality, professional looking site.

• Choose and purchase a domain name
• Find a website hosting company
• Select an editor to use to build your website.
• Buy an FTP program (optional)
• Buy a photo editing program (necessary).

Sometime during your website building journey (a website is never done), you will need to decide how serious you are about building your website, especially if you're using for business purposes.  A successfu;, high ranking website dones not happen overnight.  Instead it is a process.  How successful it is depends on choices you make, either to seek out professional help, or become a serious web developer yourself.  To be successful, you must consider these factors:

• Fast Loading:  Many new website builder forget that not everyone out there has a high speed connection.  In rural areas, many still depend on dial-up.  Websites heavily laden with graphics and video take forever to load for these types of visitors.  They react quickly by clicking the back button, never to return to your website. You need to decide who your market is, and who you are trying to reach, and design your website accordingly.  If in doubt, check your loading speed on this website.
• Multiple Browsers:  Not so long ago, Windows Explorer and Netscape were your only choices as far as a browser goes.  Today, we have serveral others such as Firefox, Opera, Safari (Mac users) and several others.  Webpages that look perfect in the latest version of Explorer may look like an absolute train wreck in other browsers.  I know from my stats that about 1 in 10 web visitors use Firefox instead of Explorer.  Page elements such as text, images, etc. don't behave the same from browser to browser, especialy when it comes to centering images.   I suggest viewing your new website on multiple browsers, and on other peoples computers.  You will be amazed at how different your website displays on computers other than your own.  It can be very frustrating.  Until stardardsare established and used by all browsers, this problem will continue.
• Clean Code:   Did you know that a cleanly coded page loads faster than a page with errors.  This is why I tend to hand code most of my work.  I then check it to make sure it isxhtml compliant.  Withoout getting too technical, xhtml is a stricter form of html code.  Every site on the web is ultimately converted to html (hyper text markup language).  Even if you log in to your site to work on it ( a web building method known as as content management), it still has to convert to html code in the browser.  Personal experience has taught me that a cleanly coded page does better in the search engines.  Proper ettiquitte is important.  Google likes a page that is cleanly coded, that it can crawl though easily with relevant links.  If you are serious about building a website yourself, and doing it right, I suggest that you learn how to write html code and learn CSS (casdading style sheets), which enhances your html coding, creating faster loading, cleaner coded pages that are easy to maintain and modify.  There are many books and websites dedicated to help, xhtml, css, etc.