So you want to build a website and at this point you may be very excited. There seems to be so much opportunity online that it seems that you cannot go wrong. You read all those sales pages out there telling you that you only need work fifteen minutes a day and you will make thousands.

Forgive me I am being a little dramatic but I think you get the picture.

The solid fundament when it comes to building websites is to understand why people go online. Number one they go online for information. This information can be entertaining or solution orientated. It can also be sought out for research purposes.

So the first question is which category do you fall into? Now let me give you that tip. If you are interested in a subject lets take health as an example its imperative at the outset to have an open mind.

What you think may work, may not so you have to be prepared for that. Secondly you need to make sure and research thoroughly so that when you make the decision you can at least know that you have done your homework and therefore your odds of success are far greater.

Let me tell you what happened to me. I went out bull headed and just picked a topic that I was interested in and was not adaptable at all. Then I just built a site and put a lot of work into it but got very little results. Then of course I lost motivation and before you know it I almost got burnt out.

I cannot tell you how depressing it is when your dream of working online becomes a nightmare of failure.

To conclude keep it simple, be adaptable, focus heavily on research and understand that it takes work so don't be easily influenced by all sorts of hype that will in essence only distract you.

Functions are used to perform a well defined task that is normally repeated at various places within a web site, web application, or other software application. The function sometimes needs certain information before performing its task, and sometimes returns a value to the calling page or program.

An example of how to use a simple function in PHP:

 function showMessage() {
echo "{$_SESSION["message"]}"; }

The above example shows a very simple function that displays the contents of a session variable called 'message'. The idea being that while a user is using a web site, etc, various messages are generated and stored in the 'message' session variable. Whenever the showMessage function is called, the contents of the session variable are displayed. So, for example, when the user logs on, you could display a message saying that they have done so. Likewise, when they log off, a different message could be displayed.

Calling a function

To call the showMessage function, you would just need to include the line:

showMessage()

in the web page (wrapped in php tags to distinguish it from normall HTML).

Passing values to a function

Often, a function requires one or more input values in order to perform its task. For example, take the following example that takes two numbers as input, and adds them together. The result is then returned to the calling web page or program.

function addNumbers($number1,$number2) {
$answer = $number1 + $number2;
return $answer; }

In the calling program we would have something similar to the following:

$number1 = "5";
$number2 = "6";
$sumOfNumbers = addNumbers($number1,$number2);
echo "$sumOfNumbers";

Obviously, in a real program you would not have the numbers hardcoded like this, but they would be obtained from user input or by some other means. Notice also that although the name of the returned variable is $answer, the calling program makes no reference to that. We could, if we wanted to, change the calling program to:

$answer = addNumbers($number1,$number2);
echo "$answer";

which might make things slightly easier to understand.

Website development is not magic, and it's not as difficult as some people would like you to believe. The many companies involved in SEO or Search Engine Optimization are correct in stating your site must be "optimized" for the search engines in order to get higher search engine rankings. What they would like you to believe is this is all very technical and sophisticated, and therefore it justifies the prices they charge for their services.

What is in fact highly technical, sophisticated and developed by absolute geniuses, are the search engine algorithms used to rank sites as the "bots" crawl the millions of sites and bring back information. But you need to understand one thing clearly. The search engines are ultimately looking for only one result - fresh content that will be exactly what people like you and I want when we do a search.

When I made my first attempts at website building, I researched everything I could about website development and how to get my website ranked in the top 10 and then using all the technical tricks and tools to make the search engines happy and rank my site high. You can guess what happened...nothing!

The only way you could find my site was for me to actually tell you my URL. Needless to say, I had very little traffic. Then it hit me, why am I trying to outsmart the brilliant people at the search engines who continue to update their search technology on a daily basis? I realized there has to be a better website development method, and went looking. Face it, with out the search engines ranking your site highly; all your work will be for nothing, because your site will be invisible!

I was very lucky to find a company name Site Build It. I signed up with them for $300, and it was the best investment I have made yet in my online adventures. The folks at SiteSell are always on the cutting edge of everything e-business. They've helped tens of thousands of people launch successful Web businesses with SBI!.

I went through their 10 day course and read every page and watched every video. They quickly pointed out the basic misconceptions people have about website development and building sites that are ranked highly by search engines and how to avoid them. What they made clear to me can be summed up in one phrase used often in their course..."content is king!"

You start your website development with a concept or theme, a subject you are passionate about, a subject you believe you can make into a business. Then you do keyword research about your subject to find out how much search activity there is about your subject on the search engines. You also look at what keywords have the highest search demand versus websites supplying that information, and the resulting gap or surplus. When you find gaps, this means there is demand for information about those keywords, and an opportunity for your concept.

Then you build content rich pages around those keywords, and guess what. That is exactly what the search engine algorithms and "bots" are looking for...CONTENT! But you must never forget the most important part of equation will be the humans that will be reading your pages, so as they say in the training - Keep it real! You must write as your having a conversation with someone sitting in front of you.

If website development is magic, then the magic boils down to three key principles.

• Your website must have a theme that you are knowledgeable and passionate about.

• You must understand you will never outsmart the search engines, and the search engines rankings are based on good content around a specific theme and keywords.

• You must keep your human readers in mind as your first priority and develop your content for them.

Keep these basic principles in site at all times and then, and only then, you will get the results you want -- traffic and increased sales!