Creating a website and you already registered a domain name?

Trying to build a website around a name is very difficult to do, especially if you have not done a very important step for the process. Your first step in building your website needs to be the planning process. Many beginners do not realize this and when their website fails, they may believe they failed. But in reality they did not fail as long as they understand the missing steps and try again to rebuild their website.

Sure, many say it is very easy to create a website with only using three steps but not one of those steps is planning.

Planning your website

This is a very critical step when you create a website. You need to figure out the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How. It may sound difficult to do, but if you take the time at the beginning of your building process, you will find out that in the long run it will save your time (and money).

Who will be your audience? Have you chosen a targeted niche?

What is the content going to be about on your pages? What will be your keywords?

Where are you going to host the site? Will you use free web hosting or paid?

When do you plan on this website being finished? 5 days, 30 days. Be realistic and set a target date.

Why do you want to build your own website?

How is all the steps above to help guide you with your website creation.

The steps above may take you a few minutes or could take you a day or longer. But each one is important when you create a web site.

Even if you already registered your domain name and built your site and your site is not working how you want it to, take a moment and do the 5 W's and 1 H. It might show you what you are missing.

When choosing the best content management system for your project, it is important to weigh both the technical and non-technical pros and cons. Both technical and non-technical reasons can ultimately affect the bottom line cost. Therefore, it is not recommended to simply choose a content management system based solely on technical language or feature set. In this article, we will take a look at an open source content management system called Radiant CMS.

Radiant is a Ruby on Rails based solution that works with a variety of databases. It has a few years of development and a couple noteworthy deployments. There are technical and non-technical reasons why Radiant CMS is a good choice for a content management system.

Technical Reasons to Choose Radiant CMS: It's Ruby on Rails based which can speed development by taking advantage of the convention over configuration paradigm. In addition, the Radiant code base has excellent automated coverage in unit tests. This means the code is well tested and robust. Unit test code coverage can be one aspect to measure when considering open source content management systems. In fact, we could suggest the amount of code covered by automated unit and integration tests should be considered when choosing any open source library and/or framework. It is an easy indicator to measure and compare. But, that is an entirely different conversation.

Radiant CMS also has an excellent extension system. This allows customizations required by your project to be made. When choosing a content management system, the ability to add and maintain any customizations should be an important factor. This point should be considered not only from the beginning, but how your customizations will evolve as upgrades and enhancements occur within your chosen content management system. In other words, if the core CMS is modified to provide the custom functionality, how can upgrades or patches from the core CMS developers be applied to your modified version. Radiant's extension system provides this separation of concern.

The Radius tagging system of Radiant is fantastic for adding dynamic functionality. It is nice that tags can be added directly to page content rather than some kind of comment or special character sequence in order to indicate non-static content.

Non-Technical Reasons to Choose Radiant CMS: Radiant has an elegant, intuitive administrative interface. It is not intimidating to the non-technical user. In fact, the design encourages people to embrace using the system, because they assume it is going to be easy to pick up and learn.

The lack of workflow functionality can be considered a feature in many cases. In competing CMS products, workflow can seem like an attractive feature at first, but is often hindrance to configure and work around for projects which require only a few administrators of content.

An additional, non-technical reason to choose Radiant CMS is cost. The project is open source and the community of ruby on rails developers and ruby on rails hosting providers is growing, so your cost risk of obtaining these resources is minimized.

Conclusion

From a technical perspective, the open source, Ruby on Rails based Radiant CMS makes an excellent choice. From a non-technical perspective, Radiant CMS makes an excellent choice as well. When combining both perspectives, we have had many positive project experiences and deployments using Radiant over the past year and a half.

Every one of us wants to create a successful website. No one wants to fail. As a consequence of this many of us are out there looking for the silver bullet. Now to me the silver bullet lies within you. You are the key to your success. Of course this sounds nice but how can it be applied in practical terms?

Firstly you like anyone else go online to seek solutions. Your idea right now is that you want to make money. So you are going to search out opportunities that enable you to achieve this.

As a result of this you are going to come across a lot of information and the information that seems the most believable to you is the one you will choose to obtain. However there is also another element at play and that is emotion. The site that outlines the benefits that speak best to your emotional desires will be the one that you approve.

To build a successful website you can use yourself as the model. In other words when people visit your site are you going to outline the benefits that speak to their emotional desires and furthermore will you provide proof by helping them to connect the dots which will make it believable for them that they can reach the goal that they desire to reach.

If your website is built in this way where you genuinely help others achieve their objective then your site will be naturally successful. It really is as simple as that but that does not mean that the work will not be challenging because it will - but if you are determined and build you site with the visitor in mind then the rest is history.