Make your website work

One thing often said about the internet is that it’s egalitarian, in that anyone can set up a site or start an online store, and compete with everyone else.

Of course, in real life, things are a little more complex than that. While you might have been able to set up a site back in the mid-1990s and take on established brand names – in the way, for example, that Amazon appeared and became one of the most common ways of buying books and CDs – it’s less simple now.

Of course there will still be the occasional success story but, while it may be true that anyone can create a website and get it online, it takes a lot more than that to make it successful, well known, and able to cope with all the visitors it might get.

We’ll explain what you need to know about setting up or revamping a website, and look at some of the tools and technologies that will help you, whether it’s for a business, a community, or just to show off your new-found skills.

Website woes
So you want a better website? Chances are, if you’re on the internet, you have some web space – it often comes free with an ISP’s package and there are plenty of other ways to get a space of your own, such as the free hosting services offered by Yahoo Geocities, Google’s Blogger, or even as basic as creating landing pages (profiles) for yourself on Myspace or Facebook.

But these basic options have drawbacks – set yourself up on Facebook and other people can only find out about you if they sign up too. Similarly, some features on Myspace can only be used by members and, regardless of your views, many people may simply think “I’m not going to sign up just to look at Fred’s info”.

Free web-hosting services, while providing a page that anyone can look at without signing up to something, have their drawbacks too. Those can include pop-ups, over which you may have no control, a less than distinctive URL, and restrictive traffic limits and/or content controls.

These mean any site that becomes too popular may end up greeting users not with your finely crafted home page, but with a message that access has been suspended for a time because the site became too busy, perhaps because Digg or Slashdot users found it interesting.

Sometimes all it takes is word of mouth for that to happen, and suddenly your hilarious animation or song sample gets so many hits that the site goes offline. There may be other restrictions too; for instance, free space may be limited by size, so there isn’t enough space to store all your music clips or videos. You can pop them on other download sites, but then visitors find the experience confusing.

Or you may fall foul of small print in your contract stopping you from using free web space for business, or for the small political party you’re planning to launch.

When it comes down to it, while it has probably never been easier to get a basic web page of some description online, even if it’s just a basic personal profile, whether you’re using a social networking site like Facebook, or free space with your internet access, once you want to do anything more than the basics, it’s time to seriously consider your options.

In fact, even if you’re starting out, if you have an idea for a website and you think it might grow, it’s best to plan for the future. You might not think you need a domain name for your site, for instance, but if it takes off, it’ll be a lot simpler for users if the name or web address doesn’t change after a few months.

Similarly it’s worth researching other things too, to see how they’ll cope with growth – pick a simple-to-configure forum, and you may get up and running quickly now, but face a major headache if you have to migrate hundreds or thousands of users to different forum software when the site is busier.