CelTrust Blog

Making a website that works

It’s easy to rush over to a cheap web host, and register a domain. For a few extra dollars, you can probably even get a free WYSIWYG editor to make your site with little to no html knowledge. And it doesn’t stop there, the features offered by leading hosts is endless. But what is important when looking over all these options? And how effective can some of these tools be in getting your Google PageRank up?

The Basic Needs of your Site

Before you can start putting together the strategy for your website, you have to understand the exact needs of your website. For this example, we’ll pretend that our host gives us a fancy “enhanced” web-based website editor, frontpage extentions (for publishing websites directly from frontpage), and PHP 4 & 5 support. This will give us a few avenues that we can take for developing our site. First, I’ll explain what each of these features offer us.

The Fancy “Enhanced” web-based website editor/builder (Wysiwyg)

These editors are full web-based editors that allow you to manipulate your websites content with drag and drop capabilities. For this setup, you can get your website going without having any html knowledge. All that you generally need to know is how to read, make items bold, and the basic use of a mouse (simple stuff right?). This setup has some great pro’s and con’s, just a brief overview here:

Pros to Wysiwyg Editors

• You don’t need to know any html
• All the formatting is done for you
• It is just like writing up a document in Microsoft Word
• They support quick and easy access to creating links, inserting images, and sometimes even spell check.

Cons to Wysiwyg Editors

• They are often times limited, and only allow you to edit segments of a site in a template
• If you are editing a template with a Wysiwyg, they may not support all the formatting
• In systems like Joomla, you have to save the data before seeing the actual formatting for special styles
• Most of them still have tons of bugs and flaws

FrontPage, or other “Web Site Builder” software

These wonderful programs have taken the typical wysiwyg editor and pumped them with steroids.  These editors will allow you to edit your website with ease. You can generally design your template, and edit all of your text in one easy place. Dreamweaver is a much more professional suite for editing a webpage and it’s template (and it puts out cleaner code), but it may feel limited if you don’t have good knowledge on editing websites. I’ll Focus these pro’s and con’s on frontpage, since that’s where most people start.

Pros to FrontPage

• It’s very drag-and-drop style
• It does everything the Wysiwyg web-based editors do
• Supports editing style sheets, and doing more advanced editing
• With frontpage extensions, you can have a website up in just a few clicks

Cons to Frontpage

• I’ll get beat up for saying this: But it’s incredibly bloated
• It’s easy to make a really unprofessional looking website
• If you use one of its premade templates, your site will look like it’s come back from the 90’s
• It’s code is really messy and has all kinds of specialized microsoft tags (not very optimal for search engines)

Why you shouldn’t use either of these setups (PHP is the way to go)

Most modern websites are either using custom website templates with beautiful CSS (Cascading style sheets) and a clean structure for designers, or they’re running a CMS (Content Management System). If you are looking to get up a site fast, that looks professional, this is the path to go. Fork out the money, hire a designer, or have a web marketing firm develop your site. I would recommend looking for a service who tailors Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services. This can push the final price up, but it is well worth it.

The part you were waiting

I didn’t write this blog just to throw this last line in, but… CelTrust does offer the development services you might be looking for . If you are looking to get a website up that is SEO optimized, and designed to represent your company - contact us. We are looking for a few smaller companies who would like to be take part in some of our new services we are going to be offering (preferably Amherst, Vermilion, Lorain Ohio Area)

Tags: Business Services, CelTrust, dreamweaver, frontpage, Google, Lorain, marketing, Ohio, Research, SEO, web development, web hosting, wysiwyg