Create your own internet professional web design easily

The best internet professional web design is the one you create. Oh, you can get as much help as you like, and even farm out some of the work, but you know your business better than anyone else. "Professional" means you expect to make money from it - think about professional and amateur sportsmen. That means this is a business web design.

My mother used to say "What's the use of having a dog, and barking yourself?" I'm a hopeless artist so I tell artists what I want to be in cartoons. Each time I've done this, the artist had great ideas that I hadn't thought of, and the cartoons were much better than I had hoped for.

The artist who did the "big bad wolf" cartoon at the top of this page is Jeff Hoyle, who lives near me in Western Australia. He only charged me $120 because he is a friend, but he might be prepared to do a special picture for your website at a reasonable price if you email him at Jeff Hoyle

However, the reason why the pictures fitted my requirements so perfectly was that I had told the artists exactly how the pictures fitted into my plans. Your custom web design will only be what you want if you take control of your plan.

Your Website Design Progress

If you haven't completed the following steps, you should go back and complete them before going on any further. Remember, this is a professional (money-making) site, so you can't afford to do sloppy work.

Researched and Planned your Website

Chosen your website Software, or decided to work without any.

Learned all the html that you intend to learn

Learned enough about php and css to get by (borrow books from library)

Bought a domain name

Signed up with a web host

Designed your Web Templates

Your web templates are part of your web page design. This page is about designing the website, which is a collection of pages.

Design a Website to Suit Your Customers

This now becomes fairly straightforward. Sketch out a rough plan for what you will want on your site. You must have a home page for each directory, which will be called index.html or index.htm or index.php probably.

I strongly recommend that you should make your pages php instead of html. While you are creating them, call them html so that you can view them in your browser. Then rename them as php when you send them to your server. The reason for this is that at some time in the future you will almost certainly want to use a php script. HTML code fits into a php page, but php doesn't fit into an html page.

Some hosts allow you to set your .htaccess file to force html files to accept php, but not all of them do, so you can evade that future problem by ending your filenames with .php

Other pages that you should consider include

sitemap

legal disclaimer

contact page

article list page

many article pages

Your Web Site Design Should Include Sitemaps

Click my sitemap button at the foot of this page to see an example of a human-readable sitemap. You can create one like that for yourself by using a large table. Creating a table is described in lesson 4 of my free html tutorials

Unfortunately, the version that the search engines read is an XML file, and you can't make that yourself. However, there is a free program that will create all your sitemaps, as long as you have less than 500 pages (if my memory is right). It will take you quite a time to build up more than 500 pages on your site. Click here to create your website sitemaps for free.

Submit your new sitemap.xml file to Google and Yahoo and MSN. Of course, you can't make a sitemap until your site exists! Some of your links will point to files that don't exist yet. That is why a plan is so important - if you don't know what files you will point to, or where they are, you can't create links to them.

Website Privacy Policy

You won't need this yet, but sooner or later you are going to want to sell something from your site or start a mailing list. Then your visitors must know that you will never, ever, sell their email address. Click my Privacy button at the foot of this page for an example.

Protect Yourself Legally

The world population is about 7 000 000 000 and most of them use the Internet, so is it surprising that there are millions of people out there eagerly looking for an opportunity to take you to court for giving bad advice? So your legal disclaimer should make it clear that none of what you say is to be taken as personal advice, but is only your opinion.

Design a Website Article List

You can write a thousand great articles, but nobody will ever read them if you forget to put links to these articles! So you want to create a listing page, and don't forget to have a link to the listing page in your home page.

If you had 1000 articles you shouldn't have them all in a heap. You should have them sorted into categories, then create a separate directory for each category, with a separate home page. Then each directory will need a much shorter article list page, because you only list the articles in that directory.

Each article in the list should be linked, so that visitors and search engines can find them.

Each article should have a link back to the home page (you can use buttons as links, as I have done in my template) in case visitors land on an article page. You don't want to leave visitors with nowhere to go.

How to Build Your Own Website Contact Page

This is like walking a tightrope. On the one hand scam merchants don't want anybody to know where they are, so when you give details of your name and address and email your visitors are more likely to trust you.

Unfortunately, there are robots out there that do nothing else than look for email addresses on websites so that they can send you unwanted emails.

You can disguise your email address by replacing every character with its HTML document character set manually if you have the table of characters. Or you can (at the time I am writing this) visit
http://www.fingerlakesbmw.org/main/flobfuscate.php and get your email disguised for you in a few seconds.

Overall Website Design

I like to use a free tool from http://www.treepad.com/ to plan where everything will go, but you can use a large sheet of paper and a pencil and eraser, so that you can keep changing things. Your computer doesn't file everything in one directory, and you shouldn't put everything in one directory on your internet professional web design. Here is my layout so far for this site as shown by Treepad. Oh, I use the paid version, but it is just a little prettier than the free version.

Overall plan for this site

You will notice some directories have an X against them. These are the ones for which I have already written a landing page (home page).