H-F-L Team: Business Plans: The Art Of The Website (Part I)

You have chosen to operate an online business to establish your Hundred-Fold-Life. The last stage of establishing a business online is the website. Because it serves to represent the business' image and provides total convenience for potential customers, the website is by far one of the most important parts to the business. Therefore, every aspect of its creation must be overseen with precision. Remember that your site will reflect how your business will be perceived.

Depending on whether or not the business owner does the work her- or himself or hires a professional web designer to do the job, knowledge of web construction is imperative. If the latter is the case, the expenses will naturally be higher, although some instructional software might be necessary for business owners to teach themselves, so that will have some cost as well. Those preparing the website should do personal analyses to determine will need to be paid and establish a budget to cover it.

This includes, too, the basic template, which is advised to be used for the home page. This tool can be purchased and downloaded from any of various sites online at a price falling anywhere from $30.00 to over $200.00. Before buying, however, one should weight the pros and cons of employing one ore more of these implants. This alone will definitely affect expenses to some extent, depending on which template is bought and how many.

Despite the cost, the webpage template has several advantages to making one's own. First of all, the template is professional looking in its visual quality. This will indeed inspire confidence in those who gaze upon it. There is also the consideration of preorganisational design. These templates accommodate the basic need of every single business: menus, title space, color and style, tables, and link icons for email, identity page and links space. Another innovation is the possibility of utilizing more than one template in constructing the entire site, which would illustrate diversity in the variety of style as displayed through each page having its own appearance. This would require more than one template to apply, although a single template can be modified as necessary. However, one page can bring consistency in appearance and arrangement to the site, as every page would look the same. In either case, cost will definitely come into play, and between them costs will undoubtedly vary.

For those who are building their own page, HTML and PHP knowledge, paint and photo shop, and clipart uploading will be necessary for implementing page coding. Just as much time will go into studying webpage design as it does in conceptualizing the business and getting own the Mission Statement, the Procedural Policies, even the budget itself.

It is for these and other reasons that the design, construction and price rely strongly and directly on the business owner, who it is, what that person's knowledge and skills are, and the person's personal preferences and funding. Once it is all determined, however, the next stage will be to laying out the entire webpage in detail to see what it will look like when completed. This will be the very first visual representation of the online business to emerge for anyone to see . . . .

(to be continued)