Here are 5 basic website development tips:

1. Planning
Long before the design begins, you should take great care to plan out a new website.  It starts with your company’s needs and your business objectives.  Do you really know what the website is suppose to do for you?  Some companies make the mistake of putting too much information on the home pages.  Other businesses don’t mention enough on the home pages.

Take a look at your competition.  Explore websites in other industries.  You can learn a lot just by keeping an open mind.  It’s OK to dream.  Make a big list of ideas.  At some point, you’ll need to start thinking about your budget.  What you plan to do with the website will have a big impact on the total cost.  Your design choices, including the navigation, can influence the budget.

2. The Map.

When you’re confident about what you need and what you can afford, then create a map of your website.  Some developers essentially create a story outlining the website in a series of boxes connected by different lines to illustrate the relationship of each page to other pages.  Think of this is the skeleton. Colors and all of the web design elements aren’t needed at this point.

3. Basic Design.

Once you know what you need, it’s best to start the website off with a static design – no programming. Why? It doesn’t make any sense to program a website until you’ve signed off on the design. It can be very costly to design and program a website only to change your mind and need to update the website design as well as the programming.

4. Programming.

After you decide on a design, the programming can kick in. The source code should comply with basic standards, common resolutions and the most popular Internet browsers.

5. Time to Launch.

If you like the final product, it’s time to launch it so you can promote the heck out of it – with customers, vendors, and prospects.

Get other website development tips.

Complaints about SEO being opposed to good web design will never cease. Paul Boag of Boagworld – who speaks a great deal on web design – reveals his heart in a new piece, “Why I Don’t Get SEO.” He runs through the usual concerns about SEO ruining the user experience and how it’s a marketing exercise with no guarantees.

SEO works because people still use search engines to find info. Once they get to a website – if it wasn’t poorly designed in the first place – they can become propsects. SEO has challenging aspects, but the idea is pretty simple. SEO as a marketing specialty connects sellers with buyers.

Long ago I figured SEO would be an old practice once people learned about websites from their friends. And, while there are many ways people can find websites, SEO is here to stay as long as people continue to search for information. Judging by the lack of SEO I encounter, it looks like SEO has a bright future.