Although this blog is my newest website domain, I have owned other websites that have been active for a while now and I have learnt to understand the importance of those little points that almost seem insignificant and that often get overlooked by many. In this guide you will learn about 10 factors of building and managing a website.

1. Finding a website host:

Of course your website will need a host, without one you'll be going no where. But choosing a host can be quite complex if you don't know how to go about it, I mean there are so many out there which one is right for you? Well to help narrow it down you will need to address certain factors, some common factors are:

• Will it be a Personal (small) or Commercial (large) website

This is important as it Identifies what bandwidth/file space you would be roughly going to use, if your site's going to be a personal one you'd want a hosting plan with less bandwidth/space, example 2 GB and 5 GB of Data transfer (Bandwidth) is a nice healthy number for someone running a personal website. If you were aiming to be running a Commercial website that generally is forecasted to get large amounts of traffic you would be looking for packages that offer three times (Maybe more) of a personal website.

• What would be your budget?

Premium website hosting costs money, and there's no avoiding it, if your serious about your website I'd strongly recommend that you consider premium plans rather than Free Hosting (As they have limits that could become a problem later)

• Wanting a server located in same country as you?

Now to many people have there website hosted on a server in USA when they are in the UK doesn't bother them, and to be honest im part of that croud but looking for a host you might be interested in there location, so make sure obtain that information. Nearly eveey host will tell you where there based just by looking at there website, but if you can't find that information im sure a email to there pre sales department won't hurt.

2. What type of website will it be?

It may seem we have already addressed this in question one, but we haven't identified what type of website it will be and by type I mean, Blog, Business website etc. This needs to be identified now before you begin on setting up the domain name or anything like that. Depending on what you choose you will need to make sure you stick to the choice. No one can really help you decide this for you as you are the webmaster here!

3. Buying a unique domain name!

Assuming that you are serious about this website you've decided to start up you will need to get a domain name. What is a domain name? A domain name is unique URL that is registered by the buyer of the domain to a domain registrar. A domain registrar is the part of the puzzle that essentially hosts that domain for you. A example of a domain:

http://google.co.uk

Domain names basically give you the freedom of those annoying sub-domains and allow you to have control of the whole domain rather than a sub-domain which would force you to have the host name in the domain such as:

yoursite.host.com

With a domain name you remove the host part out of the URL and get to be able to have a URL with simply:

yoursite.com

You can also choose various other domain extensions such as .co.uk, .org, .net, .info the list goes on.... However coming back to the domain registrar point, would will need to register the domain with a registrar there are many out there but here's a personal list of domain registars that I'd recommend:

http://www.name.com

http://www.namecheap.com

http://godaddy.com

You might want to check out each of them and compare them for the better deal.

4. Will you be using a content management system?

So now you've set up your website, domain and know what type of website is going to be you can use a content management system to aid in your in publishing your conent. Depending on what type of website you are running there are a vareity of different CMS's to help you.

If your running a Blog you can use:

WordPress

Symphony

And others but I'd recommend those as a top two choice

If your running a standard a website you can use content magangement systems such as:

Drupal

Joomla

PHP Nuke

PHPWiki

There are plenty more, infact if you want a complete list, WikiPedia has a nice table of them here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems

5. Your website's category/target audience

You need to establish what the catergory of your website is as well as what your target audience is going to be. Before you can find your target audience out you will need to establish the category, you can find website categories simply when you submit your domain name within search engines. It will ask you to choose a category that best fits your website, thats when you'll know your websites category, from there you will then need to consider your target audience depending on what you chose as your category:

Example: If you chose Teens/People as a category you target audience would be Teenagers

It's not always as simple as that, but determining the target audience is key.

6. Start building your website!

Now that you have all the background information and "Behind the Scenes" research and work out the way, it is finally time to start adding content to your site! There is nothing worse than a website with barely no content visible and the webmaster expecting it to be popular. You yourself have to spend time and effort into getting your website URL out there! Producing content is your job as the webmaster and making sure that it keeps the visitor engaged and not bored, otherwise you'll not be getting those important returning visitors!

From here you'll be wanted to start off basic and get those priority developments done first such adding in your meta information in your site (so search engines can added it to there search lists) and adding in the neccersary pages like About/FAQ's, Terms etc but you'll also want to make sure your site has a decent enough layout so it's presentable, now I don't mean something spectactular that takes you months to create! Layout before content although it needs to be addressed first, you can make do with a simple layout for the time being, and then spend more time on the layout when you have some good content up that your users are enjoying! There's nothing worse than a site with an amazing website layout but no content what so ever!

7. Your visitors are priority!

After doing all this you will need to wait for a while and by a while I mean months. Months because you will need to watch your website and it's visitors and see there reactions to content and factors like that, your visitors will be playing a key part in your websites success. To get the full opinion of your website you may need to ask visitors personally what they think which will require you to do some more research, but if your serious about having a successful website you'll do this without thinking twice. A nice added bonus of this though is visitors may take a liking to being asked there opinion personally, instead of being given the link to some questionnaire, they may see it as a opportunity to really give you there feedback, which is crucial as you will be taking this feedback in and acting on it!

8. Website Statistics

Without statistics you can't be sure on how your website is actually doing in terms of traffic figures and rank, as the internet has exploded which popularity in the last 15 years there have been many statistic websites that have been created for monitoring websites traffic rank, popularity etc. You will be needing to use a website statistic site, otherwise monitoring those crucial figures is going to be a impossible task, but much like domain registar's there are so many services out there!

I can recommend a few that I used/have used:

Google Analytics

Alexa

Stat Counter

These are my top three, a note on the stat service, Alexa. This is a public website statistic site, meaning you can look at your as well as anyone else's website stats. Where as the other two services require you to own a account and are private stats that only you can access.

I'd recommend however that you only use one statistic service. Using multiple statistic services for the same website could give you different data (Because you have to remember that each statistic server will differ from each other) Different data leads to false data and false data leads to mis-interupretations.

9. Keep your website updated!

Keep updating your website with new content regularly. As the webmaster you are responible for maintaining and updating your website, a constantly updated website shows that the website is active and the webmaster cares about the website. Not updating your site with content regulary can lead to your visitors thinking the site is inactive and you could lose some traffic because of this. Thats why it is important.

10. Learn about the "website scene" as you build and develop your website!

When you first create your first ever website you won't know much about the whole website scene but as your site becomes older you gain knowledge which you can apply to your website as well as future projects. You can't learn it all in one day but you can as you learn yourself.

There's only so much someone else can tell you, but you yourself hold the knowledge to creating that perfect website!