Think about it for a minute. If you want to sell directly to a visitor your site is going to look different and function differently than a small local business website that wants to drive traffic to its brick and mortar shop or office. Your website is an extension of your marketing efforts and you should seriously consider just what you want it to do before you start building it.

Here are a few steps to help you out with your website planning.

Website Purpose

As mentioned above, you have to understand why you’re creating the site. Take the time to reduce what you want from the website to writing. Brainstorm with your partners or friends, or even better, with your customers and find out what they would like to see. If you do a good job with this task you’ll end up with an impossibly long list of objectives ranging from lead generation to providing online customer service.

Take that list and prioritize it by importance. Once you’ve done that, look at the top three or four objectives. These will be your primary goals. You’re new at this; don’t try to create the perfect website on your first time out. As you gain experience the website will evolve and at some point you will have covered every item on your prioritized list. The important thing is to get started and if you wait until you have what you think is the perfect design you will have missed out on significant opportunities.

Website Appearance

There is an incredible number of design options that are limited only by your imagination and budget. One way to make choosing a design plan a bit easier is by doing a little comparison shopping. Visit your competitors’ sites and write down what you like and what you don’t. Go through the same exercise with sites that come up on the first page of a search engine after you enter a query that’s relevant to your business. Pay particular attention to the ease of navigation, number of panels in the layout, color schemes used and the type and placement of graphics, videos and photographs.

Review your list and then sketch out what you would like your home page to look like. Once you’re satisfied with the rough design it’s time to think about building.

Website Platform

A platform is the software that the website resides on. The free platform WordPress has become extremely popular with small businesses because of its built in features that eliminate much of the technical design and development skills required. Of course there are other options as well, some free and some that cost.

Before you make a decision on which platform you’re going to use, do some research and get a feel what other webmasters think of the product. Remember, your site is not going to be a static sales brochure. You’ll be making updates on a regular basis and you want a platform that is not only easy to use but that doesn’t take all day to modify.

If you follow these three steps you should be in a pretty good position to go forward with an actual website design and launch. Remember, these sites are not carved out of granite. As you get experience with traffic you can modify and optimize your design to better achieve your objectives.

1 ) Ecommerce Websites

2 ) Banner advertisement

3 ) Social networking sites

4 ) Blogging, etc

Be it a brick and mortar business, a consultant agency, a travel agency, an institute, a sports academy, etc. all have their Websites online.

What is an ecommerce website?

Any website that is meant for the purpose of business is an ecommerce website. It is mainly related to buying and selling of services and products through Internet. The website carries:

Business details- type, infrastructural details, etc.

Products images and their description

Contact information

Why an ecommerce website?

A Business cannot be successful unless it is promoted in a systematic manner. In the present scenario, Internet has emerged to be one of the strong and effective medium of endorsing a business. It has many benefits over other mediums like electronic and print.

Benefits of an ecommerce website: It helps a business earn a huge amount of sales revenue because of the following benefits:

Mass Reach :- Your online store is open 24×7. There are no time constraints, no holidays, etc. Visitors can purchase the required products or services at any hour of the day. This adds to the convenience of the buyers.

Also, as the products are properly categorized on the websites, it saves time of the customer.

Time and convenience :- Your online store is open 24×7. There are no time constraints, no holidays, etc. Visitors can purchase the required products or services at any hour of the day. This adds to the convenience of the buyers.

Also, as the products are properly categorized on the websites, it saves time of the customer.

Cost effective :- Maintenance of the online store is negligible; you just have to pay the web hosts some amount of money to upgrade and renew your site. The money spent on the staff and general maintenance of a store is saved.

Use the latest software versions. While this may sound like something, which everybody knows and does, it’s not uncommon to find a very old version of a script running on a certain site. The words “it was working okay, so why update it” can sound like a reasonable excuse, right until the moment your site is hacked. Newer software versions often include security patches for exploits found in previous versions. This is very important if you are using a CMS script like Joomla or WordPress.

Check for common vulnerabilities. Cross-site scripting and SQL injections are the usual suspects – there are a lot of tools, which can help you check if your site is secure. Such vulnerabilities are most commonly found in custom developed websites – the popular CMS scripts are usually well protected against such attacks.

Check your log files. The log files may seem like just gibberish and non-sense technical data, but they are actually important – they can show you information about who tried to access your site, what errors were caused, etc. It’s always surprising what you can find in your logs. A check a week or so will not hurt your free time, but will be good for your site’s security.

Check your files’ permissions. On a Linux sever, the file permissions will determine who can access and modify your files. Select your permissions so that only you can edit them, and avoid using 777 permissions – a file with such permissions can be edited and executed by anybody, which is dangerous.

Use secure passwords. The simplest type of attack is a brute force attack – a script will try to guess your password, using random letters and numbers. The more complex the password is, the harder it will be to break it down. Passwords, such as “mypass”, are much easier to break. A combination of lower and upper case letters plus numbers will make the password much more secure – mYp43s. If possible, you can also add symbols to make your password even more secure. However, have in mind to keep your passwords easy to remember – you wouldn’t want to forget your password and not be able to log into your mail, for example.

1. Eliminate unnecessary plugins

Don’t use too many plugins – they will noticeably slow down your website. Imagine them as too many apps running at the same time – they will affect the overall performance of the blog. Keep the number of the plugins low – let’s say from 5 to 10, but don’t go over 20.

2. Optimize your Database

All the information for your blog posts and comments is stored in a database. So, to speed up the loading speed, you can optimize this database. There are two ways to do that – with the WP-Optimize plugin, or manually. The plugin is the easier way, but always remember point 1 of this article. If you want to do things manually, follow these instructions:

1. Inside your web hosting Control Panel, locate and open PHPMyAdmin- you can find it in the Database Manager section.
2. Once logged in the PHPMyAdmin, select your database.
3. Click “Check All” at the bottom of the page.
4. Choose “Optimize table” in the drop-down list next to it.
5. Done!

3. Cache your Database

Another way to speed up the work of your database is to cache it. This way, you will reduce the number of queries made to the database each time a user visits your blog. You can cache your database with the DB Cache Reloaded plugin.

4. Disable Post Revisions

Post Revisions exist since WordPress 2.6 and they are useful when there are several writers working on the same blog, or if you make constant changes to your blog posts. If left enabled, this feature will create multiple entries for a blog post in your database, effectively slowing it down.

5. Use a Cache Plugin

You can also create static versions of the most visited web pages. This way, you will reduce the queries made to the database. And static HTML pages load much faster. There are a lot of cache plugins, but be careful with their configuration – if they are left untended and not properly configured, they tend to use too much CPU power.

6. Optimize your images

Have your images optimized – you can use Photoshop’s “Save for Web” function, which will save the image with a good balance between size and quality. Here is a list of other image optimization tools:

Online Tools:

• PunyPNG
• Smush.it
• Online Image Optimizer

Desktop Tools:

• Shrink O’Matic
• PNGGauntlet

7. Optimize your CSS and JavaScript files

Another way to speed up your website is to optimize the CSS and JavaScript files – this way you will reduce the size of the files and save some disk space and decrease the server load. There are several tools you can use to do that.

To compress the CSS files, you can use several tools:

• WP CSS plugin
• CSS Optimizer
• CSS Compressor

To optimize your JavaScript files, use:

• JavaScript Compressor

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