Website Creation Pitfalls

Designing and building a great website is fun and easy. All you need to do is get some tools, or learn HTML, then start working. You just make the website, submit it to search engines, and people will come to your site. After all, it is a great site, very useful, and hou have great products. Better still, you built it. If you build it, they will come. Right? Wrong!

If you want a world class web site, it takes planning and work. It may be fun, but like any other endeavor, if it is not well planned and executed properly, it is likely to fail. If you are building a web site for your hobby or family and don't care who reads it, then fine, you don't need to plan ahead. It does not need to be a world class web site.

My Experiences and Pitfalls

I created my website manually. It was created offline, using a free HTML editor called Arachnophilia. Then the content was uploaded to a webhost provider. Since I had no budget, I chose to use providers that provided free webhosting with advertising on the site. So I did the following:

1. Started creating the site offline and got a basic working site.
2. Chose the first convenient web service provider and uploaded the offline content.
3. Continued expanding and updating the site.
4. Became unhappy with the first provider and moved to a provider with better tools and more storage.
5. Continued expanding and updating the site.
6. Realized that web crawlers could not crawl past the first page, but didn't know why.
7. Figured out that the HTML document type letter case was incorrect in all my pages and I had not applied the three types of document types properly for framed documents or those that were not framed
8. Updated all my web pages and had to re-upload them to the web service provider.
9. Found out that my web host provider did not allow enough files to be on their site to contain my entire web page although, I had more file space available.
10. I changed web host providers to one that had better FTP access, more available storage, and allowed more files on the site.
11. Learned more about HTML and style sheets.
12. Found out it was easier to update and add style to pages using style sheets.
13. Updated all pages to use style sheets and uploaded them again to the new web provider.
14. Decided to move the main pages away from frames and modified the main pages to not use frames and left tutorials to use frames.
15. Re-uploaded new pages that didn't use frames.
16. Asked opinions from outsiders about the web site and found out the layout, graphics, navigation, and color scheme needed improvement.
17. Updated the main pages and asked for opinions again.
18. Made a few adjustments, and updated more pages.

It is obvious that a little foresight would have saved quite a bit of work and time