A lot of people want to make a website now a days. You can use a site builder or start from scratch. People create a website to make money, do something when they are bored or just to help people. One thing that a lot of people ask when creating a website is that, what should I include or do and what should I not include and do. Follow these tips on what you should and should not do on your website:

What to do:

  • Build a good theme. What we mean by good theme is, clean and simple, easy-to-use and featured
  • Have a commenting system
  • Have a forums system (if it applies)
  • Pick a good font (easy to read), good font size (not too large and not too small) etc.
  • Good color contrast- don't have purple text on a black background- it makes everything hard to read
  • Use the same type of colors- don't have purple and green on the same page
  • Have a simple navigation bar
  • Organize your posts into categories
  • Use a Content Management System like WordPress or Joomla
  • Use social networking- Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc.
  • Proper grammar and spelling
  • Test your site in all web browsers (a great, free tool is http://www.browsershots.org)
  • Optimize your site for search engines
  • Have a good host with good load times
  • Choose a topic that you like
  • Continue to update your content with up-to-date news etc.
  • Always write your own articles

What not to do:

  • Don't have flashy ads
  • Don't have a simple HTML page. Use a theme
  • Don't resize the browser window for users
  • Don't have pop-up ads
  • Don't have music play automatically when a user visits your site
  • Don't have video start playing automatically
  • Don't open all links in a new browser window- it's pointless and looks bad for you. If you don't want people leaving your site, look into toolbars that sit at the top of the page when somebody clicks a link from your site and brings them to a different site
  • Stay away from frames- it's confuses search engines
  • Don't put copyrighted content on your site

This is the first of a series of tutorials that we will be doing on how to create a website, tips when creating a website and how to's. Stay tuned for more!