Internet Strategies to Improve Farm Business Management - Designing and Building the Website Yourself

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Designing and Building the Website Yourself

If you feel you are technologically savvy you can design and build your website yourself. Before you start make sure you have compiled the content and made a layout of how you want your site to look.

The decision regarding which software to use to build your website is an important one. There are many options. The most popular are Microsoft's FrontPage and Macromedia's Dreamweaver. Neither software requires that you know a programming language. However, FrontPage is considered entry to mid-level software, more appropriate for first time web page designers. Whereas Dreamweaver is more advanced, meant for more skilled designers. Both allow you to view the web pages as they will appear in a web browser during development.

Don't Make the Same Mistake They Did

Seeing the mistakes that other people made with their websites can help you during you web design process. Web Pages That Suck (http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com) has compiled lists of poorly designed websites for you to look at and hopefully keep you from making the same mistakes. Gathered from a number of different sources, here are some top website design mistakes:

Unreadable text/fonts
Browser incompatibility
No contact or company information
Takes longer than 4 seconds to figure out what the website is about
Bad navigation
Too much material on one page
Complex backgrounds/ bad color combinations
Too many animations
No organization
Outdated information and links
Essential information is buried/hard to find
Pages that load too slowly, usually due to large pictures

Once you've chosen your software you only need to take your content and layout and input it into the program. Remember, building a website yourself will take time, more so if this is your first time doing it. Don't get discouraged. Many colleges and universities offer classes on using the different software programs for building websites. You may want to take a course to improve your skills if you intend to build and maintain your own website.

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These materials were developed as part of the Southern Rural Development Center’s National e-Commerce Extension Initiative. They are based upon work supported by the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under Award No. 2005-45064-03212

Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the Southern Rural Development Center.