News Article

When you visit a new town where you haven’t been before, you no doubt notice the skyline first - sort of a “calling card” for the city, yes? And when you look at the newspaper, what do you notice first? The headline, of course. And think of your favorite TV show - I bet you’re thinking of the opening credits.

We all make judgements about items based on what we first saw or noticed about them. The same is true for websites. The first thing you see when you go to a website is the header of the page.

Whether or not your content is as good as your header, visitors will tend to stick around when they see a good header on your site - because they will make that leap of logic. This leads to your readers sticking around longer and looking at your content. This means more traffic, recommendations and even links to your site!

Your header does two things which are vital for your website. One is giving visitors an idea of what sort of content you have on your site. Secondly, it provides a measure of the quality of that content. A good header, at least in the minds of web surfers, equals quality content.

As you can see, the header does two very important things. Your visitors can get a quick idea of what kind of content your site offers, as well as giving a sort of gauge of the quality of your website overall.

Each of these functions are greatly important, but the second may be even more important than the first. There are millions of websites out there and possibly hundreds or thousands compete with yours. If the style or make-up of your header gives your website the look that it lacks quality or professionalism, your traffic will go to your competitors instead.

It is hard to underestimate the value of a well designed and well planned out graphic header. You may not even notice the effects of a good header on your website.

Keeping visitors coming back and staying on your site longer is something which you can ascribe to many factors: content, better search engine rankings, new features and the like. However, in many cases it is your header which is doing all of this work: out in the open, yet behind the scenes.

There are not many steps for building a website. The secret is just “do it”, don’t wait until you are some kind of expert, you’ll learn as you build the first one, then two, then three, and so on …

1. To start with you either need to be an expert at coding HTML, PHP, ASP, Java Script or…. better yet, don’t worry about knowing anything and just get yourself a website builder, a program or tool that puts together a website for you with little effort .The tools can be gotten for free or purchased and others are available for a nominal cost (considering what they can do) if you have something “special” in mind.

These applications, along with some templates that you can also get for free or purchase, let you put together web pages without much knowledge when it comes to HTML.

Bet you-re thinking that these things are expensive. Go ahead and do a search on Goggle or Yahoo for “free website builder”…., what did you find?….a few hundred thousand sites with them. Go ahead and get a few, try them out, I’m sure you’ll find at least one that works.

If you only have a few “extra” hours each week and you don’t have the time to devote to a website builder, free or not, you can purchase a website builder that helps you generate the pages with little work by you. They will cost you a little, but they will build the entire website in a matter of minutes.

These allow you to put in some articles that you wrote, or had written for you (.doc or .text), the content of the page, or a bunch of keywords, and when you click the “Go”button they generate a few pages or a thousand pages, whatever you wanted.

2. Register a domain name. A “catchy” name that is some what related to what you are selling or your website.

3. The next thing to do is to find “hosting” for your website. A host is who puts your website on the Internet. You give them your file, you FTP the files from your computer to theirs and “viola” your website appears.

4. Now you actually need to have something to put on the pages of your website. If you are hoping to sell stuff, and maybe make some money selling products from our store, ebooks that you created or bought resale rights to, affiliate products, or have Adsense on your site, then you need to have original and informative content that puts the visitors to your site in a buying mood.

Like the website builders I mentioned up above you can purchase original articles for the pages of your site. Writers on the Internet are pretty easy to find and for $5 - $20 you can the content you need.

Pretty simple huh? Sure you do need work on some search engine optimization items, such as the keywords and meta tags of the pages of your new website.

Now that your site is up on the Internet you need to start working on getting visitors to come by your site. And the way you do that, among other things, is to submit the site to search engines, directories, maybe even pay per click. But the important thing is already done, building a website and putting it up on the Internet