Making Your Website Look Like a Butterfly

A well designed web-site is like a butterfly, it is beautiful and you have an irresistible urge to watch it, check it out see if you can fathom its meaning. That is your goal in building a website.

You have to come as close as you can to creating that feeling when potential customers look at your first page, you want, you need to have them take a good hard look at your site.

So Sarah, How do I do that? Well I am going to go over the basic steps for building an attractive site. Before you get started you have several tasks and items to procure or obtain, you will need a:

Domain name

Hosting company

Either a WYSIWYG editor

Or An all in one package

A course on HTML

Decide if you are going to build your site yourself

Once you have decided on these very basic first issues you then have to decide on how your site will be built as a mini site with or one or two pages or a content site like this one about ten pages or a full fledged affiliate site with multiple tens of pages

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Then what is your niche? What appeals to your customer base – this is when you need to do lots and lots of research to get it clear in your mind as to what will best suit your market niche.

On Items 1-6 I would recommended that you bite the bullet and really learn how to build a website – that means you buy a product like FrontPage or XsitePro and you use the WYSIWIG editior (what you see is what you get) Programs like these examples let you build a site with little to no html coding knowledge. If you are going to be in this business then be in it and take the time and invest the energy to learn at the basics of website construction. This knowledge will provide a strong foundation from which to build you Internet understanding.

IF you select either package you do not need any sort of html editor, it is built in to the package. There are many free software packages I would suggest that you do a google search for website software. This will provide you with options as to whether you purchase a program or download a free program.

I purchased a book from Barnes and Nobel (they have books on many popular website programs) that came with a great cd tutorial for 24.95 that walked me through the steps of constructing my first web site. This may have been a bit more difficult than hiring a web-designer, but with the aid of my book and a purchased program I built my first site in less than a week. Now, I am a not a computer wizard so if I can do this so can you. I am a firm believer in that if you are going to be in this business you should at the very least have a basic understanding of web site construction.

Now you need to buy a domain name and I strongly suggest you buy it from or through your hosting company- if not you will be stuck for 60 days before you can transfer the name to another host company, A really good hosting company is hosting revolution – Their 20.00 per year plan is more than adequate to get you up and to run your first several sites.

The first thing to remember is that your website is a reflection of who you are and your target market. Before you can begin the process of building a website you will need to get a registered domain name and a host company to put your site on the Internet. You then have to decide how you will accomplish the sometimes-arduous task of constructing the site.

The look and feel of your site should be like a butterfly, by that I mean it has to capture your visitor’s attention in a very short time span. Everyone stops to look at a butterfly as they float naturally in the summer air. One method of determining how to do this is to go look at websites, spend a day or two just looking to see what about different sites makes you stay and look around or makes you click off in a few seconds. The first impression one gets when visiting your site is of paramount importance. If they like what they see and how the site feels, is it easy to navigate? Does it make sense based on the headings and site titles? Are you satisfied that the site is a reflection of who you are and what you are doing? Does it draw your eye to the site or cause you to look away.

Something you should be aware of because I was not when I started this process. I purchased domain names from one provider who will call Company A (I shopped for low price) I repeated the process of looking for a low priced alternative for hosting. We will call them company B.

I then tried to transfer my new domain names from company A to company B. Well they tried for several days to accomplish the transfer and they were repeatedly told the domains were locked by myself and I spent several very frustrating days working with Company A to transfer the domains. Then I found out that when you first buy or renew a domain name with a specific registrar the domain has to stay with them for sixty days.

If someone had been able to inform me of that before I shopped for the best price and thinking just how intelligent I was then I would have saved myself over two weeks of working on nothing but the transfer of these names.

These are only the basic steps necessary to construct your first site, if you keep the butterfly theory in mind and develop a site that is attractive and natural looking people will be much more likely to stick around long enough to make a buying decision.