Define Objectives

There are many good reasons for building a web page, but it is important that your goals are clear before you begin.

Your objectives should guide your page design. Many people build home pages as a hobby, purely for their own personal development. Others build them to promote business, social, cultural, humanitarian, or financial objectives. What ever your purpose or goal for your site, put some serious thought into it before you begin. One of the first steps we’ll discuss further is how to register a domain name. If you have not carefully considered your objectives before registering a domain name, you may end up with a domain name non relative to your web site’s purpose.

As an additional benefit to learning web design consider that knowledge of web page development can also help you in your career. The additional title of “Web designer” added to your resume is a great boost to your potential for being hired and also in your job stability with your current employer. Many businesses today have their own corporate intranet sites, which are simply internal internet systems used to share corporate information. The ability to communicate and offer up services through a company intranet and online is a valuable skill to employers.

There is also potential for generating income from the web pages you develop. This is done by publishing interesting pages that attract large numbers of visitors and then selling advertising space, goods or services from those pages. The internet term for this type of web design is E-Commerce. We discuss E-Commerce later in this design tutorial also.

So, what will be your objectives?

A simple home page that you can use to allow your family and friends to keep up with your daily life?

An information page used as a public service?

An E-Commerce page designed to sell a product or service as a source of income to you or perhaps to promote funding for your favorite charity?

Or perhaps a combination of any or all of the above?

It’s your web site and your personal work of art. Design and develop it to suit your own tastes and style. You’ll find the process of developing your web site to be very rewarding as the ideas that began in your mind become a virtual reality.

Your web site’s purpose can be for anything you desire. Again we remind you, do have a basic outline in mind of your intended goals and purpose before beginning your web site.

The next step in getting your web site online is to register a domain name to be used as your world wide Internet address…