Planning a Successful Website Course

Hi there and welcome to Planning a Successful Website. My name is George Plumley. Glad you could join us for this. This is really all about saving you time and saving you money and of course frustration. I have been a Web Developer for over 15 years and I've seen a lot of bad situations where people have gone, got bad advice about what to do, got charged for things they didn't really need, all these sorts of problems and I really want to prevent that. And to help you get a successful website that you don t have to change when you later completely redo it and I've seen that believe me. So this course is really like a virtual consultant, it's going to help you plan a website, a new website or even help you makeover an existing website. Make sure the site you ve got is the site it ought to be. So whether you re going to do the task yourself or you're going to hire out, you ll have the basic information you need to understand what's involved so you can talk intelligently to the people you re hiring or finding information you need to do it yourself and do it right. I've broken the course down into 9 sections. The first one is about Site Planning and this is really, really important, even if you ve got an existing site it's important plan out the changes you re going to make. So we take some time doing that, understanding why you have a site, what it's for and what it needs to do. Then we talk about Domains and Hosting, very, very important of course to get the right Domain Name, how many domain names do you need? Where should you be hosting? What should you be looking for in a hosting company? Website Design, what are the elements of good design? How can you talk to Web Designers intelligently or if you want to do it yourself what are some of the principles you need to understand? User Experience, how easy is it going to be for visitors to use your site? Are there things you are doing right now that are turning off your visitors and what could you be doing better? Mobile, making sure that your site is compatible with Mobile Devices, a huge opportunity in a growing field. Content, the big one. This is why people are coming to your site right? So we need you to have the best possible content organized in the best possible way. Social Media, very important way about getting the word out about your site and about your content. How do you integrate that with your site? Search Engines, of course one of the main ways people find you. How can you make sure your site is visible to the search engines and getting ranked well? And finally what do you need to do to keep your site running smoothly. What are the ongoing tasks you need to perform to keep it at its peak performance? So there you go, that's what we need for planning a successful website and these are the 9 sections we're going to go through and I hope you enjoy, get a lot out of it.  

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