OK, You're after a website for your business or personal use? where do you start? Here we will try and give you an idea on what to plan and organise yourself to minimise time and costs involved in setting up your website.

Firstly lets discuss your hosting, this is the place your website will be stored. You usually have 5 to 10 meg of space that comes with your Internet provider access, this will usually have a www address similar to this

www.yourisp.com.au/~yourname

This is fine if its for your personal use but when it comes to your business that involves perhaps advertisements, business cards, letterheads it isn't good enough! here's why, if you were to change ISP's then your www address on your business cards and other printed materials is no longer valid, you may aswell throw them away. This is why something more permanent is advisable such as your own domain name.

Having your own domain name basically means no matter who you have as your ISP your WWW address will always be constant (aslong as you register it every 2 years), so your advertising and printed materials always have the correct www address on them for instance

www.yourcompany.com.au

All applications for com.au domain name must comply with the com.au name allocation policy. Before continuing, please read carefully the entire com.au name allocation policy. The com.au name allocation policy conditions include that applicants:

Apply using your eligible commercial entity name (ie company, business, legal name, trading name) to register your com.au, and
The domain name can be derived from either the complete entity name, or an abbreviation. If you use an abbreviation of the entity name ensure that you use only the characters contained in the entity name while characters can be removed from the entity name, the sequence of the characters cannot be altered, and
New characters that do not appear in the entity name cannot be introduced

Once you have your domain name figured out and check to see if it is available to you, you then need somewhere to store your website. There are many company's out there that offer web hosting you may even have some space that came with your internet account.

Internet providers chop and change prices and I don't know about you but im always shopping around for a cheaper faster internet connection, so rather than use your free 5 meg of space with your Internet provider which you probably can't attach a domain to anyway your best bet is a hosting company.

You can organise your domain name and hosting all in one depending on how you go about it, many hosting company's will take care of it all for you for a price! you just have to find the best price with the best service.

You may want to turn your website into a shop later down the track so it's wise to think of these things and ask the hosting company if you can add this to your website at a later date without having to upgrade your web hosting to allow you to use a database in your website.

There are quite a few things to look out for and I guess to the unqualified it can be quite daunting. Sometimes it's best left to the people in the know.

OK, now we will look at planning how many pages you will need for your website, this will help you get a more accurate price when looking for a quote on your site.

Look at the flowchart below this is the best way to decide on what pages you will need, at the top we have the button WEBSITE this will be the first page the visitor sees, basically the welcome page, this would be where you say you hello's and offer the webpage to them as a resource for there information needs just as you would if someone walked into your business in the real world

as you can see we have as our main headings Profile, History, Products, Contact us and Links pages, so far we have 6 pages including the welcome page, now under Products we have 5 sub pages of Chairs, Tables, Bars, TV Cabinets and Beds. This now gives us 11 pages, but this client also wants a page with a large map of his location as a separate page branching out from his Contact Us page, so all up we know we now need 12 pages for our new website.

Let's see now, we have the pages we want and we know there heading names, so now we have to organise what we want on each page as far as text and images go.

When we talk pages we basically look at a page as being an A4 sheet
this A4 sheet can have as much text as you can fit on one side of it using 12 point type size, images we will say around 4 per A4 sheet, so going by the amount of pages we have just decided on we can expect to have to find enough information for those pages, this can come from things such as

• Printed Logos or Logos on disk (digitally preferred)
• Text prepared by yourself (digitally preferred)
• Company brochures
• Catalogues
• Manuals
• Take Photographs yourself
• We can take photographs for you
• anything that can be scanned

If you organise all this information before you even contact us the speed with which your website is created will be greatly increased, as we are governed by how fast the information gets to us, if it trickles in we can only complete small areas at a time.

Always remembering that the more you do yourself as far as typing, image creation, logos making etc. then the less we have to do for you and this will keep the costs down, but we can complete anything you want and were happy to take your money, after all were a business just like you, if I could make my own TV I wouldn't need to buy one is what im getting at.

Once you have completed your planning and organising your ready to give us a ring and get us down to give you an idea on what the costs would be. If your happy with what we come up with then we can take your information away with us and get cracking on your new website that very day.

We have created a web page checklist for you to use in your planning stages it may make life easier for you, just hold shift down and left click to download

Website planner Checklist in Word

Website planner in PDF