If you are building a website, you may be feeling overwhelmed about what to do; but if you want to build it correctly, you should assess your needs and what you want the site to be and do for you. Making a list of what you need and want will help, but you should also make a list of what you can, invest both financially and in terms of time, and what you want the site to do for you and your clients. Once you have these things in place, building your site will be easy.

Know Your Direction

Just like any endeavour you undertake in life, you need to know your goal. With a business it’s easy to say that goal is to make money, but you probably have other goals in mind, too. If you are selling a product to inspire people or a service that will help the environment, these are also goals for you. You are planning to change the world or lives, so you need to include that in the direction or your business plan. Making money should never be the only goal a business has or else your business won’t have much substance.

Know Your Design Needs

Once you have that direction you will know what your site needs to look like. This is another reason why “making money” shouldn’t be the only goal of your business because it’s hard to narrow down a design simply for money-making. If you are selling cloth diapers, for example, and they save people money and help the environment, you may want to consider using green colors in your design since you’re promoting a “green” product. If you are helping people with inspirational materials, put pictures and quotes or music on your site that will uplift people, and be sure to change them often so people don’t get bored with them. There are many web templates out there that can make your design easy to accomplish.

Know Your Involvement

Finally, know what you can do for your site. It is easy for people to say they want to have a hand in all of their business aspects, like selling and building a website, but this isn’t feasible. If you’re better at selling than you are web design you need to focus our energy on selling and leave the web design up to a professional that can do the work properly. If you are good at web design you can save yourself money by doing the work yourself, but if you don’t have the time to invest in keeping up with the site you need to hire someone to do that for you. Once you build the site, you need to be committed to keeping it going or else there is no purpose in having the site at all.

Building a website can be made much simpler if you know what you want form the site, what your consumers want from the site, what designs you need and like, and how much you can invest of your own time and money. Once these things are clear to you knowing what to do with your site will become clear, as well.

About the Author: Garlak Theodorakis

My name is Garlak Theodorakis, I am graphic designer with almost 10 year experience in the field. Founded Tooft.com in january 2010 with idea to share my knowledge with the world.