• Define your objectives. What is your Web site going to do? Providing information on everything about your company is the most logical choice. Do you want to have a section for job seekers? You probably sell products or services; it is highly recommended that you list some of your products, so that potential customers can become aware of them.
• Check out other company Web sites. Although this may sound like industrial espionage, it is an important part of the research you must do. What Web sites attracted your attention? What did you like and not like when you surfed some other companies' Web sites. Do you like their layout, pictures, organization, information content, online ordering facility, etc.? These insights will help you a great deal in designing your own Web site.
• Draw a story board of your intended Web site. Lay out the information and the linkages among the data. Do not worry about the graphics or the content at this point. Just figure out in your mind how the flow of your Web site should be organized and determine the themes for each page.
• Write content for your Web pages. Often, you can do this job yourself if you are comfortable with writing. However, since the quality of your Web site reflects your company, you should consider engaging a professional editor to do some writing or at least the final proofreading.
• Acquire graphics for your Web site. For most of companies, this task will consist of digitizing pictures of your products. Although you can scan most of the pictures yourself, but we have noticed that a lot of people do not know how to do it correctly. The result is a picture file that is 0.5M to 1.0M bytes in wrong format and resolution. Bad graphic files will either slow down your Web site considerably or produce low-quality images.
• Set up an online ordering system. As we mentioned earlier, if you are a vendor, you want the customers who come to your Web site to be able to buy your products online. It saves the cost of maintaining a large customer service staff, and your Internet customers probably demand an online shopping capability. Data show tremendous growth in online B2B, and you should be ready for it.
• Putting your Web site together. Even though you have the content and the pictures, they are not enough to guarantee you an attractive Web site. We highly recommend engaging a graphics professional who can put together a nice, color-coordinated layout. The money is well spent. However, you can work with many kinds of software that will build a reasonably goo-looking Web site. It is just a matter of how you want your Web site to look and how confident you are with computers. It is an area in which pinching pennies is not cost-effective.
• Testing your Web site. You should check your Web site on different browsers (Internet Explorer and Netscape) and different machines (PC and Mac). You will be surprised how the rendering is different on different platforms and sometimes can turn a very attractive Web site into a distorted one.
• Get feedback from your staff and friends. Have people who never saw your Web site look at it. They are probably the most accurate way to gauge whether you have a good Web site.

Things to avoid:

• A Complicated introductory page. Though the pizzazz is there, a flashy page with music and animated graphics provides no information; it just takes the viewer's precious computer resources to load the page. Besides, some animation requires special plug-ins (additional software to your browser) that may cause the user's computer to crash.
• Missing or buried contact information. It is highly advisable to state your contact information prominently on the home page or as a link in the home page. An e-mail address for parents to contact your company is a must.
• Bad or poor e-mail. You must have a valid e-mail address if you have a Web site. Avoid having an e-mail address that does not relate to your own domain. That is, if your site is myCompany.com, can people contact you as info@myCompany.com or do they have to send to your AOL e-mail? The former is much more professional. You can still keep your AOL e-mail and read it on AOL. What you need is to retrieve e-mails sent to info@myCompany.com, and you can easily do that with most ISP providers (certainly if you choose CampDepot.com to host your site).
• A graphics-laden page. Most people's access to the Internet is still through modems, so large or too many graphics files on a page take a long time to load and that frustrates the user.
• Inflexible shopping cart. If you have online shopping capability, your ordering system must be flexible enough to allow a user to shop until s/he is done before a checkout is made. Prompt the user several times before making the purchases final.
• A slow server. People expect that, as a vendor, you have a quick Web site. It is a good idea to make sure that this is the case.

CampDepot.com can help you build your own Web site with an online store. We have many options, both in levels of support and prices. Click here for more details. We can help you establish a great presence on the Internet; the money will be well spent. If you have an existing Web site, we can host it for you and help you give a facelift. You will be surprised at how low the cost is.

For more information, send us an e-mail at webHosting@CampDepot.com