So now that you have the name of your website all ready, all that’s left is for you to do is to really get it off the ground. You wouldn’t believe how many people there are who just rush out there and put a little money down to buy a domain name (which by now, you know is the same thing as a website name) and then forget about doing anything. Getting off the benches and actually putting in some work to make a website can be a huge step – psychologically. To begin with, even if you may have learned how to develop a website, you actually have to put it to use. And that’s always a little extra hard.

While getting something together and actually putting something out for the world to see can be a bit scary, you have to understand that no one ever gets anything right the first time. There’s no shame in getting things wrong a little bit. You just learn through the school of hard knocks. With websites like this one that teach you how to develop a website though, the hard knocks don’t even have to be that hard.

So let’s get started actually creating a website.

Now developing a website needs to be something that gets done in a carefully considered and deliberate way. Just as long as you don’t take that to mean that you need to agonize over every word and every picture for days. All it means is that you need at least think a little bit about what exactly you want your website to look like. That’s how to develop a website.

Now you certainly have an idea on a basic level what it is you want to do with your website – you probably want to display your writing or your thoughts on sell something – whatever. Whatever information you want to put on your website, let’s assume that you have all that material written out, all those pictures taken and so on. All that you have left to do is to work out what goes where on your website, and how the visitor is supposed to jump back and forth among all the different articles and pictures and pages you have.

Basically, you need to develop a kind of system for what goes where so that you can keep things organized as you go about creating a website. When you have a system in place, whevever you need to update anything or change anything down the line, you’ll know where everything is and how it relates to everything else.

Step one – develop an outline for your website

 The best way to start with a system would be to begin a permanent record of your website on paper,  of the basic outline your website will have. In this outline, you will place all the data in physical form that will go on your website. It’ll help you keep track of where everything is on your fast-growing website structure.

You’ll be grateful that you did this at some point. The more you website grows, the more difficult it will be to find where everything is. Once the pages of a website are in place, it can be very hard to change anything. The search engines already know what’s where, you might have other websites are linking to your website –if you move anything around, it would really mess everything up. So being deliberate about it and developing an outline right now will help you see where everything goes and if it belongs there. Because once the page goes up, there’s no turning back.

Now while you’re preparing your website’s outline or your website’s blueprint, you want to put down on paper exactly what links there are on each page and where they lead. For every webpage that you record on your logbook, you need to also list all the graphics and all the content you put there. Yes, that’s a lot of paperwork. But you had better believe that it’s going to really help.

There is more paperwork afoot

The outline isn’t even the only kind of paperwork you need to keep. A website journal would not be a bad idea, either. If you could make it a spreadsheet, that would be even better. Whatever works for you. Quite apart from all the paperwork and records, you want to keep an exact copy of your website exactly as it appears on the net, right on your computer, on your hard drive. You need to keep it backed up. It isn’t difficult to mess something up on your server and scramble about for a way to back it up.

Now there’s all this work that goes into learning how to develop a website, because once things go live, there’s little you can do to change it. Of course, you could just go in and change anything any day. The only problem is that once your site goes live, the search engines and other people will know about it. If you change something or take a page down and put it elsewhere, there’s no way you can tell the world what you’ve done. You’re just going to have a situation where everyone ends up with a bunch of broken links.

But it’s inevitable. Sometimes, you will have to move things around after the fact. When that happens, you need to be able to set up a kind of system called an automatic redirect (we will learn about this later). This is where anyone who comes to the page is automatically redirected to wherever you decided to put the page.