Perhaps you just published your website for the first time, or maybe you're just thinking about creating one. It's only natural to wonder how your site will stack up against the rest of the pack. Building and maintaining an effective website is an ongoing, never ending challenge. As you will quickly see, there will always be something you can do to make your site better, faster, more visible, more informative, more attractive, more navigable blah blah. There's a lot to do and consider.

It's just you, a beginner's knowledge of website design, and your vision of the perfect website. Not all of us have the luxury of a large budget that allows us to hire professional website designers. So we need to become very self-reliant. Not only will we need to design our website from scratch, but on an ongoing basis, we will need to be able to accurately assess the effectiveness of our website, and define and implement changes that will enhance our visitor's "website experience".

The goal is to present you with information and tips about developing a website from scratch. Here we will cover topics dealing with:
• planning your site (laying the foundation)
• homepage effectiveness
• the attributes of a solid navigation structure
• website aesthetics
• web content-the good, the bad and the useless
• improving the technical aspects of your site
• promoting your site
• tips for overall site designing

The purpose of this short tutorial is to provide you with suggestions, guidelines, practical approaches and solutions that will make your site effective, easy to use and focused. As much as I'd like to, we can not help you with creating gif or jpeg images for your site. These are artistic view & perception of what you are willing to show the visitor. We also assuming that you have sufficient technical knowledge to write your own HTML and publish your site. If you are not comfortable with the technical aspects of creating a website, then we would strongly recommend investing in an HTML editor such as FrontPage 2000. We are recommending this Microsoft’s© office bundled software (prior to Office 2000 version & later released version) as it has the ease view & familiar outlook with one of the very common Microsoft© Word Processor. Even though HTML editors have their limitations, they are a fantastic tool that allows beginners a simplified approach for getting started in web creation and design.