Building a website can be a daunting prospect for novices and seasoned professionals alike. Software and technologies change all the time and as the Internet develops so your range of choices increases. This incredible freedom of choice is a double edged sword. On one hand you can do virtually anything. On the other hand, information overload makes it impossible to determine the best way to do things.

With myriads of products and services clamouring for your attention it's important that you are clear in your own mind about what you want to put in and get out of your web presence.

Let's start at the beginning and finish at the end...

Analyze your website requirements

This can be harder than it seems at first for two reasons:

1. there are many things to consider
2. your requirements now may change later

Offhand, you might be saying all I need is a simple webpage to show off my CV. That's fine - if it really is all you need. But what happens when you want to show off your latest project work? What if you need some way of indicating whether or not you are available for work? Your rate changes? How about linking to partner sites and colleagues? Do you want to generate some revenue by advertising?

To cater for this, prebuilt website are extensible and can change with your needs, so if you don't consider everything from the start, it's not a huge problem. However, as an exercise, jotting down every requirement of your new website is an invaluable exercise.

Determine the best fit solution

Once you know exactly what you need you can begin to look at how to achieve it. There are three main options to consider...

Hosted blog publishing tools

In a small number of cases, where it is not your intention to ever have anything more than a basic blog, it is possible that some of the hosted blog sites are suitable for you. Remember, that if you suspect for any reason that you may need to retain some control over the direction your site takes, it is better to take the plunge now and get your own site.

Some of the more popular ones are:

Blogger
Typepad
LiveJournal

Custom development

In the event that you need something super specialized that no-one has done before then it is likely that you will need to splash out and hire professional developers to build your website for you. Custom website design from the ground up is expensive and can take time.

Remember that the vast majority of any of your potential programming requirements have probably already been solved by someone and are available in some form or another - most likely in an open source project such as Drupal or Joomla.

If you're adamant that a professional, custom design is required then you may want to look at our resources page for a list of recommended service providers.

D.I.Y

Undertaking website development yourself is both challenging and rewarding. The good news is that it is very possible regardless of whether you have any experience or skill beforehand. The reason it is possible to build a professional and powerful website without requiring prior knowledge is because of several projects that make tools for precisely this purpose freely available.

Some of the main ones to consider are:

• - Drupal
• - Joomla
• - Wordpress

Any of these projects will freely provide you with all the tools you need to built pretty much any website you can imagine. Whether you succeed or not is down to whether you have the tenacity to overcome the initial steep learning curve.

Talking of which, this is precisely where site prebuilder comes in. We prebuild your website (using Drupal) so that your learning curve is smoothed out considerably. You also benefit from our prior knowledge by not having to research and learn about each and every bit of available functionality beforehand. With thousands of snap in modules available in these projects, this is a tangible advantage.

Design

The term design is fairly broad and doesn't just relate to how your website looks - its colors and images. It also refers to how your website is laid out. Where the content is stored, how it is accessed and where and how the main functionality is presented and used.

Handing off your website to custom designers takes care of this problem for you, more or less. Remember that it is quite possible that what is developed on your behalf, at your expense will not be what you want.

Designing a website from scratch yourself is a Herculean task and not something that is recommended under any circumstances.

So where does this leave us?

Open source web platforms like Drupal seperate out the presentation and theme of their websites so that they can be worked on in isolation. In other words, changing where a piece of content is displayed on the website doesn't require you to change the whole website around - just the theme part.

Site prebuilder goes one further and provides you with the option to select your general layout beforehand and installs a basic easy-to-use theme that allows you to customize the site's look and feel using nothing more than CSS (cascading style sheets). Don't be alarmed if you have never heard of CSS - it's relatively easy to use and saves you from having to dig around in HTML or PHP (until you feel ready to take them on, that is).

Develop & Deploy

Website development is a trade off between these three things:

• cost
• time
• effort

No matter what you do, you will pay for your website in increments of each of these three aspects.

For example, you save time and effort by handing off development to a design firm, but then you most certainly pay the price.

You can avoid this expense by developing the site yourself, but what you save in cost you expend in time and effort.

A package like Drupal can save on all three, although you are still subject to time and effort expenditure.

Site prebuilder, like Drupal, saves on all three except that it goes a step further towards saving you time and effort by shaving off time you would normally spend learning by trial and error.

Generally, in order to save time and money (and most likely your sanity) development of a website happens on your own computer using a downloadable webserver to test everything out beforehand.

This should make sense to you because you can immediately understand how bad it is for your fledgling website to be live when it is still under development. There could be broken links, untidy design, incomplete information and so on. Any visitor would likely never visit again.

Accordingly, deployment refers to the process of taking your completed website and getting it up and running on the live servers. There is nothing particularly complex about this process although these is a fair amount to do. You have to make backups, re-configure the site to fit the requirements of the new server, clear out caches and so on.

Again, site prebuilder can help by providing instruction and even taking control of this process entirely.

Manage & Market

Once you have completed development of your new website the real work begins. While very basic websites can often run themselves with little input required, it is unlikely that this strategy will be of much use. Far more likley, is that you regularly check up on your website to ensure that nothing is malfunctioning, that its security is intact, that is is up-to-date, that there is regular new content and so on.

If you want your site noticed you have to shout it out to the world. Marketing your website is an involved and time consuming process and often comes at considerable expense. Again site prebuilder can offer cost effective packages to suit. Regardless, marketing and promoting your website will take time and effort on your part whether or not you choose to hire third parties from time to time.