Drake Technologies

About
This article is dedicated to newer and inexperienced webmasters but should be considered as a good read to experienced administrators alike. This article is written for Drake Technologies and The Admin Zone exclusively, but if you would like to use this for your website, be sure to leave a source link.

This article will be broken down into several sections and I will attempt to organize them chronologically in the order of items you should put into consideration first on the planning stages of developing your website. This is written by Joshua Drake, a freelance developer and web enthusiast with over a decade of experiences building, buying, selling, and flipping web sites.

Section 1 – Defining Your Niche

niche   [nich] noun, adjective, verb, niched, nich·ing.
–noun

2.
a place or position suitable or appropriate for a person or thing: to find one’s niche in the business world.
3.
a distinct segment of a market.
4.
Ecology . the position or function of an organism in a community of plants and animals.
–adjective
5.
pertaining to or intended for a market niche; having specific appeal: niche advertising.

Every website, regardless of what it’s about, has a defined niche, and if it’s been online for more than a year, the webmaster has typically succeeded in making their website define said niche.

When you are planning to start your website, the first thing you need to decide is your niche. This is something that once you are out of planning, MUST be set in stone. One of the worst mistakes a new webmaster can make is changing their target niche and generalizing their content, diversifying their audience and crippling their traffic. Typically, if you have an idea for a website, this part is already taken care of, but as I just mentioned, you must be dedicated to your niche if you want to maintain any authority with your website down the road.

For this article, I’m going to use a generic niche, gaming. Should we make a gaming site? That’s a rather vague topic and has been done 3 million times over by individuals and private businesses alike with funding far greater than ours, so to make this a more feasible idea, lets specify further. We are going to carve our little place on the internet and make a name for our website as an authority on XBox 360 gaming!

Section 2 – Defining Your General Audience

Now that we have an idea of a website that we want to make (Xbox 360 Gaming), we need to determine who our audience would be. This step is important to make before setting anything up for several reasons. It allows us to take a closer look at the competition, it allows us to make generalized predictions of what our website wil look like in time, it will give us ideas of keywords to focus on, and it will give us ideas on how to market our website in the future.

To define your general audience, you need to look at it in a demographic point of view. Who plays Xbox 360 games? Who looks online for more information about your expertise? Who goes online wanting to discuss information they’ve accumulated?

To answer these questions, it’s time to use our friend, Google. Simply start searching for phrases as if you would be trying to find information you are wanting to release. In our case, we will be looking up the keywords ‘Xbox 360′. Look at the forums and community based results you find such as blogs, galleries, etc. Look at the obvious for information, such as member counts, post counts, guest counts, or if publically visible statistical demographics. How many individual websites do you see on your google search that are specifically geared towards your niche?

By looking over the clues provided, we can determine that our website would be viewed by primarily American males between the ages of 13 and 40. This small bit of information tells us more than you think. The accessibility rating of the website due to the ages of our general audiences is incredibly low, meaning we can customize the site nearly any way we want. We can design for high resolution if we want, we can use darker colors that wouldn’t normally be used, etc. Not to mention, with the information acquired, we know WHO is best to market our website to!

Now we have our niche (xbox 360) and have determined our target audience (young American males), it’s time to move onward to the next step.

Section 3 – Choosing Your Domain Name

This is a very important step, because it is something that you will unlikely not be changing. Ever.

When deciding a domain name, there are a small amount of things that you need to keep in mind. I will address several. Who is our registrar? What are some ideas of what our domain will be? Is it already taken? Do I want a .com, .net, .info, etc?

One at a time, who is our registrar? To answer that question, the first thing that needs to be explained is WHAT is a registrar. Registrar, as defined by the english language, is simply a record keeper. The kind of registrar we are looking for, however, is a very specific record keeper who we pay to record our domain name. To put it simple, we register a name, the registrar takes that name and matches it to an IP address that our host provides (we will get into that later). Hopefully that makes sense, if not just ask, but for brevity I have no intention of writing a book to more details of what a registrar is. For this article, we will use one of the more popular registrars available, GoDaddy.com.

So we have selected our registrar (GoDaddy), now we need to decide what name we want to give our Xbox360 website. Obviously names like XBox360.com will be unavailable at this point, so we are going to have to be more creative than that. Not only that, but we will need to come up with several in the event that the one we want the most is taken. I’m not going to come up with any for this article, and will just refer to the site as an Xbox 360 site, but I’ll still be giving some tips. During this stage of development, I would advise to come up with anywhere to 4-8 names to research. The name of your site isn’t typically important, but it’s always best to come up with something that correlates with your niche and is also highly memerable. Several years ago I closed a website named Cursedprophets.com, which was an art community. This is where I learned the importance of a good domain name. While the name was ‘cool’, it might have been memorable, but it doesn’t correlate with the sites content, so it doesn’t leave a proper imprint in the guests mind matching a name with a face (metaphorically speaking).

Next, we register our name with GoDaddy. Going through our list of potential names, start with your favorite and work down. If the name is taken, go to the next. After that, it will ask if you want to register as a .com, .net, etc. Ideally, you want to go with a .com as I personally find those to be the most memorable.

So now we have our domain name figured out, it’s time to move on to the next step in developing our website.

Section 4 – Choosing Your Structure

So we know what kind of website we want, we know what our domain name is going to be, but what are we going to put on our website? Is it strictly going to be a content driven site? A user-based blogging site? A forum driven website? While this kind of decision can change throughout the life of the website, it is important to have the structure in mind for the long haul, because if you make any changes, even changing the directory from ‘blog’ to ‘blogs’ can completely reset your backlinks with major search engines unless you leave a proper redirect, which if you have 1000′s of pages of content, can be far more tedious than it is worth. That in mind, it is best to decide what we want to start with now.

For this example, we want some sort of content management system (or CMS for short), with a user based blog, photo gallery, and forums for personalization. This in mind, we want the base or ROOT of our website to be the CMS. If we were using a seperate software to control each task, we would have seperate directories for each function, such as /blog, /forums, /gallery, etc. For this example, however, we will be using a software suite that can handle all of the above, vBulletin.

Section 5 – Choosing Your Software

Just because I’ve already decided what we are going to use for this example doesn’t mean this step should be discounted. You want to know what software you are using for whatever task before you get started, because changing your mind in the future might or might not be an option. That said, you might want an individual software platform for each task, such as Joomla for your CMS, WordPress for your blogging solution, Coppermine for your gallery, and MyBB for your forums.

Section 6 – Choosing Your Host

This is probably one of the more difficult decisions you will have to make, but lucky for you it’s something that you can and should change as your needs progress. There are, however, several aspects you need to look at. While price is always an issue, there are other matters to look at. Look, for instance, at the requirements the software suite we will be using has. vBulletin requires a server with PHP support, which means we will typically be looking for a web server with a LAMP setup, or Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP. It’s important to look for that particular setup, because if you get a Windows IIS server, it’s almost definite that the server will not allow PHP, but ASP and ASP.net in its stead (which won’t work for vBulletin).

So you’ve found you a server with a LAMP setup, what next? To get started, you should be focused on cheap, namely a shared hosting solution. Go ahead and shop around for something cheap that offers enough space and bandwidth (or transfer) to suite your needs. The host I personally use (and have for years) is Site5 as they maintain reliable uptime and offer packages substantial to hosting multiple websites with one package.

Section 7 – Keeping SEO In Mind

SEO, or search engine optimization, is vital to the success of every website. It is an ongoing process from the inception of your website until the day (if ever) it closes down. I’m not going to really give details of what to do, other than advise you to research articles and guides to SEO as that is a topic far to large for the scope of this article. You can find several items on what to look at at The Admin Zone and there will be some soon here at Drake Technologies. Keep in mind that improving your onsite SEO and increasing backlinks and exposure are things that need to be constantly on your mind. Every day. For the rest of your life (or your websites, whichever dies first…)

Section 8 – Building to Expand

It’s no fun visiting a website, coming back in a year and see that its the same as when you left it. It’s also not very fulfilling to build a website and not have anything left to do after the day of inception. That being said, you always want to build your website with the ability to expand. Lucky for us, our software suite does that for us by allowing us to create catagories to expand in content, or building site sponsered galleries, etc.

Section 9 – Choosing Your Staff

As a website grows in content, traffic, and in our case users, not all content on your website will be created by you. Visitors, however, view all discussions on forums, all content on blogs, EVERYTHING as a reflection on YOU, the webmaster. That in mind, user driven content will need to be moderated that way items that shouldn’t be viewable by your typical guest WON’T be (at least won’t be for long)

After a while, it can be troublesome and possibly impossible for you to manage everything by yourself. This is a good time to employ staff members. These should be people that you trust the image as well as the site itself to as they will be volunteering their time to help you with something they care about. This should also give you a little extra time to market your website and improve upon what you have.

Section 10 – Setting Milestones

Now that we have successfully planned out and excecuted the creation of our website, there is one more important detail to look at, were we go from here. A good idea is to set milestones for your project, or measurable goals to hit before you move to the next stage of your operation. As an example, once you hit 500 registered users you can consider deploying a new, more professional and expensive design that is more pleasing to your guests? Or even create a fundraiser for such? Another exmple would be that once you average 2,000 or so visitors on a daily basis to monetize your website a little to cover some of your costs or perhaps make a profit.

It’s important to keep such goals in mind, and even more important to act on them. Keeping these goals will be very good in motivating you and will also encourage you to keeping the ideas on your website new and fresh.

Conclusion

This will be the first of a series of articles (and probably the least specific), and I hope it helped out at least a few people. If you have any questions or perhaps what to give some pointers to add to my series of ‘Getting Started’ series of webmaster resources, feel free to send me a message either at The Admin Zone or on Drake Technologies Forums.