If you are in business for yourself, an executive with decision making power, or head of your company, you are probably bombarded with advice, opinions and information about how to build or re-vamp your website and how to use it to your advantage in business.

To be as successful as possible in your e-business, you’ll need to plan ahead and you’ll need to properly fuse disciplines of design, technology and marketing. From conception to reality, process of manifesting a website draws upon a multidisciplinary approach.

The more time and effort you put into planning and building your website, or revamping an existing one, more successful you’ll be. Your new site will have more potential in accomplishing your business goals, your business will look more credible to all people visiting your site, and you’ll increase your bottom line.

The following is a guide for building a new website. It shows how a corporate webmaster or Web department creates a world-class website, and it is same step by step process that every organization, no matter how small, should follow.

Step 1 – Discovery: The first phase involves determining scope of project, timeline and scheduling parameters, everyone’s expectations, and your current human and technical resources.

Step 2 - Concept and Planning: The next step is to determine site requirements, business goals, types of functionality, site features, and a timeline and due date. You’ll need to determine who your site audience is, demographics and psychographics of your visitors.

In this phase architecture or organization of information that will be included on site needs to be planned as well. The most important part of this step is determining your goals for site. You need to ask yourself and any other stake holders exactly what new site ought to yield when completed. What do you expect site to do? What do you want to get out of it? What messages do you want to convey to all people who will eventually view it? What are priorities of site in terms of your business and making money? What types of people will be using site and what will they want to accomplish while there?

Step 3 - Design Specifications: This is when look & feel and a visual design specification are created. Here you’ll determine fonts, colors and size and layouts, always trying to keep consistency paramount. You’ll want to write specifications for images you’ll be using on site as well. It’s also time to decide upon and design technical infrastructure and architecture of site, server, environment and platform. You’ll determine what programming languages and databases will be used, if any, and any other technical features your site will need.

One of secondary benefits of following Step 3 is that you’ll have a document to refer back to later on when adding to site. If you hire a new Web person of company, you can give them this design specification document for them to follow whenever they work on your site

However, your satisfaction of making a fresh start with a new computer is tempered by fact that all of your "stuff" is still on your old computer. Everything that made your old computer YOUR computer: your personal settings, your business files, your company spreadsheets are still loaded on your old computer.

You find yourself with a new computer that's not so great without a whole lot of useful file information that is still stored on your old computer. How are you going to get all of that information onto your new computer?

The process is called "data migration" and it can be a tedious and time-consuming task for you and your business.

Here are some suggestions to make this data migration go a little easier for you.

CDs

One option is to copy ("burn") everything to recordable CDs.

Blank CDs are cheap, at about $1 apiece, and can hold more than 600 megabytes each. That much storage space should be enough for most small businessess to transfer old data files from one hard drive to a new.

Two drawbacks to CD method of data transfer are that:

~ It may take a while to burn each CD and ~ That you may not have a recordable CD drive on your old PC.

Recordable CD units are standard on newer PCs but if older computers have a CD unit, it was insatlled as later add-on hardware feature. Thus, depending on age of your older computer, it may not have a recordable CD drive installed at all. To install a recordable CD drive on your older computer now, may be more of a time-consuming effort when compared with other alternatives to moving your data files.

Portable Drives

Iomega has a pre-packaged solution designed to bridge gap between old and new computers. They offer a software "moving kit" for individuals who have recently bought a new computer with Microsoft's Windows XP.

The software works with Iomega Zip, Jaz and Peerless drives. It allows individuals to "pack" files they have on their old computer onto a portable high-capacity disks and then "unpack" same files onto your new computer.

The transfer software uses Microsoft's "files & settings transfer wizard," a feature included in Windows XP.

After connecting a high-capacity drive to your old computer, you need to download transfer tool, which primes a disk to prompt you to begin transfer process next time it is inserted into a drive. Setting up disk also requires a CD with Windows XP operating system.

Keep in mind, software moving kits, have ability to move everything. Thus, if you are not aware of what files that you are transferring, you may be transferring unneeded problem or virus files to your new computer.

Link Transfers

There are other options if you do not want to shuffle CDs or portable drives.