The first thing you will have to deal building your website has nothing to do with the web design itself, it's me related to content writing but it must be defined and will effect the rest of your actions. So first of all you need to decide what the topic of your future website is. Topic is very closely connected to another web design issue: keywords. The keywords you select will depend upon the topic you have chosen. When thinking about website topic ask yourself a few questions: What is the goal of the site you are making? What are you trying to achieve with your site. Specify a goal, preferably in one short sentence.
Take a sheet of paper and a pen and put all you can think out about your future website. Brainstorm! Just put everything that comes to your mind: what you want to give to your visitors, what the site is about, what you want to accomplish with your website, what is your experience in the area you would like to select as topic? The more points you could think up the better. Then sort it in the number of importance. Think what points can be deleted without harm to your project. Delete them. Leave only what is REALLY important. Try to get your goal out of those points.
Choosing topic is like choosing the topic for college research paper. You should try to select reasonable balance between too wide and to narrow topics. Narrowing down your website topic might be very helpful. If you have narrower topic that means you have less competing topic thus it will help you to get better position among your competitors. However if the topic is too narrow nobody will ever bother to search for it. Let me give you example: you want to build a website devoted to website design, but if you try to develop this website guess how many websites you will have to beat to get on the top? I got 4,030,000 pages devoted to website design according Google . To check this number just enter http://google.com and then enter "website design" in the search form on the first page. Now let's see how many sites Google indexed with the topic "Flash website design". I got about 22,300. As you may see the result of indexed web pages is four millions smaller. So creating website about flash design will be much smarter then just to make "website design" site and be lost in those millions pages. Note that "Website design" and "Flash Website Design" are not only keywords, the Flash website design is a part of website design but it is smaller part. Searching search engines keywords related to the topic you have selected may be helpful in making decision about your website topic. I'll teach you how to select "right" keywords to obtain better position on the search engine listings in the next articles.
Do not hesitate to reset your goals. Try to think about audience of the website. People like to visit websites with the original and unique content. Will your website be able to provide your visitors with such content? Will visitors come back again and again or they will simply close the browser window and forget about your website?
The better the plan the less work you will have to make. So if you could define the topic and define it clearly you may proceed to another step of website building: choosing a domain name.
This article may be reprinted and distributed with no charge until the credit line below remains without changes.
Thanks for reading.