With all the possible solutions for building a website it can be impossible for someone with no knowledge in web design to know what direction to go or who to trust. Although I promote myself as a web developer I also understand the need of small business to be able to save money and get to grips with at least how their website works. There are solutions available to build a website with the many online services available.

I cannot honestly say that any of them are what you think they are. Meaning they provide you a set of tools to create the pages of your website and offer up what is called templates for how your content can be laid out and then give you a small variety of designs to work with. They provide you with a rudimentary type of navigation that you use to link your content to a menu. They give you a way to manage images that you can use on your pages and in galleries. There is a place to setup and manage your products, images and information for an online shopping cart. The more expensive solutions offer ways that will help you get your site listed on the major search engines.

What none of them offer you is the understanding you will need to know how your site visitors navigate your website. Or how to best organise your pages so that they make sense to them. They offer no help in understanding how a search engine views your website and organises that information for the search results. In fact most if not all of these services can hinder your ability to get the results you need by adding proprietary code to the back-end of the page. The area of the page that has the code a browser sees before you see the page intended for you.

The code base or language these services offer in all but a few is based on a system built in house (by their development team) and contains ways to keep it from working with any other system. Many times the code will only work on their servers and requires additional code that they will not give you in order for your site to work. This has two caveats for your website, for one if you decide they are not giving you what you need to grow your web presents. Or otherwise don't give you the level of support you expected. You will not be able to take your site somewhere else and work with it because the necessary code is not available to the website. So all of your work is for nothing and you will either stay there and settle for a website that is not working the way you want or looks like crap. The second downfall is that with the code used on your sites back end (the code the search engines see) will not be well formed and can have some serious negative effects on your search engine ranking. In many cases it will prevent your site from ever making it to the top pages where people search.

So if you have read this article to this point you are probably serious about building your own website but you now see that there is more to it than just signing up for a service and working through the online documents and building your website. All of this is very much like Alice falling down the rabbit hole and believe me when I tell you that I have only described what will happen when you first realise you have fallen in the hole! I cannot tell you everything you may run into because I honestly have not worked wit all of them.

What I can do though is offer you some bearings and a direction to go in understanding how to setup your site on these services so that you stand a better chance of getting what you want out of them. So now you are thinking great one more service I have to pay for in order to get a website. I can only answer that my consulting service is very reasonable and I guarantee that you will benefit from what I can do for you. Just like with my web design services I will not price gouge or have hidden fees to spring on you. I only offer these services to help you understand usability requirements, explain the laws that surround making your site usable to persons with handicaps and give you bearing on how to best layout your websites navigation and heracy so that it will make sense to your site visitors. I will not be able to help you with working with the online service you have decided to go with or how to do any of the internal functions you will use to create your website.