Building or Rebuilding A Site

Build A SIte

There are 2 ways to get started with building a site:

  1. You already have a domain and you need to build a site for it on a specific subject suggested by the domain name.

    I suppose there’s a good reason why you own that domain and I hope it’s because you have already had the idea of the type of website that should be built for it.

  2. You have an idea of a website subject and will get the domain that best reflects that.

    Don’t get bogged down by trying to come up with a good domain name. It’s not that important at the start.

In both cases don’t worry about the design and layout. Concentrate on the website content organized into pages, if only as a skeleton at first. From those the site hierarchy and navigation will soon become apparent.

Deal with the design and layout next.

Maybe you want to use a CMS or you prefer (and are able to) build the site from scratch. I prefer the latter, though occasionally I give in and use a CMS like WordPress. At least this allows building the content quite apart from worrying about the actual design.

Did I say worry about content first? By that I mostly mean text content, though images and other media like video will likely have their place as well.

Images and other media need to be picked carefully for appropriateness to the page content, not merely as decoration, then resized and optimized for the web.

Rebuild A Site

Keep in mind that experience shows that it’s a bigger challenge to rebuild a website than building it the first time.

That’s because you have to decide what content should be improved on, what should be kept as is and what should be scrapped altogether, as well as what new content should be added.

In general merely changing the graphic layout of a site does not have any impact on its performance. However reorganizing pages and content can, will and should have an impact. The challenge is to make that a positive experience  for the visitor and, by extension, for search engines.

Changing the platform, such as going from ordinary site to a CMS or vice versa,  will generally involve the introduction or elimination of certain types of pages, perhaps change of url structure, and quite likely a modified navigation and thus perceived hierarchy of the site’s pages.

Blank page syndrome again … Stay tuned 😉