OK, so what's point!

I was reminded of this while searching web for joint venture partners for an extremely lucrative deal I wanted to offer them. I was more than a little surprised at what I found; or what I didn't find more like.

I couldn't believe how difficult it was on a lot of websites to find an email address I could use to contact webmaster or someone at company. Granted, some had one of those featureless online message forms. I don't know about you, but I find them very impersonal, somewhat akin to posting a message in a bottle, tossing it in sea and hoping sometime someone will answer.

I much prefer a proper bona fide email address that I can enter in "To:" box of my email, and a name of a real person to converse with. I'm sure I'm not alone. There are probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of your potential customers jumping up with a hand in air at this point, shouting "Me to! Me to!"

The first step in designing a website is most likely most crucial step in determining success of a website. Let's compare a website to building a house. Everyone knows first step in building a house. You have to plan everything out and have a strong foundation to build on.

A website is no different from a house. In fact, a website is your digital dream home, and only you can build it how you like. Most websites that fail on World Wide Web because they lack a solid foundation on which to expand. In this article, I will show you how to create a solid foundation for your site and how to plan and organize your site.

Starting Out

A lot of people, when they set out to design a website, fire up their fancy WYSIWYG editor and start pushing keys left and right. They probably didn't stop to think about how their site would be organized, where their files would go, or even where they would host their site.

These sites are most often sites that fail, because their webmasters get frustrated with site and deadends and mental blocks that they hit. All this can be avoided if a site is properly planned out. Almost every professional site has spent a significant amount of time planning out their site.

Where to Start?

The best place to start planning out a site is with it's purpose. A site without a purpose will almost always stagnate and fail. On an 8 X 11 piece of paper, write out purpose of your site. Having purpose written down on paper will make it seem more "real" than keeping idea in your head. Also, it's real easy to get distracted on Internet, so having purpose written out on paper will help keep you on track.

What's Next?