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Thank you for visiting my website's home page
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Ever-changing objectives mean that the information on my website has to be repeatedly re-organised and on several occasions during the past five years, this has meant that changes have had to be made in the way that the information is displayed.
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Currently, my website is undergoing another of these re-designs and at the moment, it is in the transitional period - the period during which all the existing information is being ported over to the new web page design.
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So, apologies if things are a bit topsy turvy at the moment.
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Five years ago, I started this project because as the writer of a weekly, computer related newspaper column, I needed a website where I could publish an archive of my articles.
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In the early days, everything was a challenge and I made mistakes, especially in the way that I organised the information on my website. Correcting these mistakes was a time-consuming endeavour.
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The internet is an ever-evolving publication platform meaning that website owners face new challenges everyday. There have been many changes in the past five years - changes that directly affect everyone - adapting to these changes sometimes means that you have to make major changes to the way that the information is presented on your website.
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Recently, it dawned on me that people may like to read about the problems that I have faced during this project and to hear how I solved them so, I have decided to add some articles covering issues related to website design and optimisation.
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When I set out, the main objective was to publish my weekly newspaper articles which was a relatively simple thing to do.
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So, did achieving this objective make my website a success ? Well, I suppose it did, but it was such a simple objective. It didn't take me long to discover that there's a lot more to owning and running a website than simply uploading some articles to a web page - I soon had a whole new list of objectives !
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Before I go any further, I feel obliged to inform readers that this is not meant to be the definitive A-Z guide to building a website. After saying that however, I am going to include topics covering what I consider to be, the most important aspects of owning and developing a website and I am going to cover theses topics in great detail.
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In my opinion, there are seven separate processes involved in building a website - Think about it, Organise it, Design it, Build it, Publish it, Promote it, Maintain it. These are the seven different areas that I am going to concentrate on in this article however, before I begin, let me tell you about how I started off.
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The first thing that I did when I sat down to design my website was to build a navigation menu. This was a mistake for a number of reasons.
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It was a mistake because in the early stages of a website build, you don't know what the layout of the individual web pages is going to look like which means that you can't know whether you need a horizontal or, vertical-style menu.
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It was a mistake because I didn't know what the final number of web pages there was going to be on my website or, what the subject matter (title) of those pages was going to be.
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It was a mistake because when I was designing the navigation menu, I was tempted to populate it with page titles and urls, like for example: Home Page, About Us, Contact Us, Products, Services etc. I was even tempted to include a sub-menu to the main menu, like for example: adding Green Widgets, Blue Widgets, Yellow Widgets etc. under "Products" - before I knew it, I had a menu linking to twenty non-existent web pages that returned an error 404. This is not good for a number of reasons.
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It was a mistake because I wasted a lot of time doing something which I had to repeatedly change as the design of the web pages altered. I don't know why, but I became obsessed with building a 'flashy,' animated drop-down menu that in the end, I didn't need and I didn't use - don't make the same mistake as I did.
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OK, I have just finished compiling a list of bullet points for page 2 and I have decided to broaden the scope of this article by comparing some older marketing methods and direct selling techniques with modern-day website marketing methods - should be quite interesting !
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