The first thing you will have to deal building your website has nothing
to do with the web design itself, it's me related to content writing but
it must be defined and will effect the rest of your actions. So first of
all you need to decide what the topic of your future website is. Topic is
very closely connected to another web design issue: keywords. The keywords
you select will depend upon the topic you have chosen. When thinking about
website topic ask yourself a few questions: What is the goal of the site
you are making? What are you trying to achieve with your site. Specify a
goal, preferably in one short sentence.
Take a sheet of paper and a pen and put all you can think out about
your future website. Brainstorm! Just put everything that comes to your
mind: what you want to give to your visitors, what the site is about, what
you want to accomplish with your website, what is your experience in the
area you would like to select as topic? The more points you could think up
the better. Then sort it in the number of importance. Think what points
can be deleted without harm to your project. Delete them. Leave only what
is REALLY important. Try to get your goal out of those points.
Choosing topic is like choosing the topic for college research paper.
You should try to select reasonable balance between too wide and to narrow
topics. Narrowing down your website topic might be very helpful. If you
have narrower topic that means you have less competing topic thus it will
help you to get better position among your competitors. However if the
topic is too narrow nobody will ever bother to search for it. Let me give
you example: you want to build a website devoted to website design, but if
you try to develop this website guess how many websites you will have to
beat to get on the top? I got 4,030,000 pages devoted to website design
according Google . To check this number just enter
http://google.com and then enter "website design" in the search form on the first page. Now let's see how many sites Google indexed with the topic "Flash website design". I got
about 22,300. As you may see the result of indexed web pages is four
millions smaller. So creating website about flash design will be much
smarter then just to make "website design" site and be lost in those
millions pages. Note that "Website design" and "Flash Website Design" are
not only keywords, the Flash website design is a part of website design
but it is smaller part. Searching search engines keywords related to the
topic you have selected may be helpful in making decision about your
website topic. I'll teach you how to select "right" keywords to obtain
better position on the search engine listings in the next articles.
Do not hesitate to reset your goals. Try to think about audience of the
website. People like to visit websites with the original and unique
content. Will your website be able to provide your visitors with such
content? Will visitors come back again and again or they will simply close
the browser window and forget about your website?
The better the plan the less work you will have to make. So if you
could define the topic and define it clearly you may proceed to another
step of website building: choosing a domain name.
