Website Questionnaire

 

1.        What Do you want your Key Words to be?

Key words are part of your Meta tags.  Keywords are one words phrases that summarize your site. (eg. a local rock band named buzz-kill would use [band, local, rock, buzzkill, jeff, jack, Jason, Jamie] as a few of their descriptive words.)

 

2.     What would you like for your Color Scheme to be?

Normally Black and White are excellent backgrounds to have, graphics are harder to smoothly work into other colored backgrounds, however, it is not impossible.  Once you have an idea about your background be it solid or a picture, you must pick a color for your Text, text links, visited links, and active links.

 

3.     Would you like a solid background or a picture background?

Solid Backgrounds are better more often than not.  Sometimes overly active backgrounds as in pictures or graphics that move as a background distract and anger your potential browser.  However, if your picture is watermarked properly, it can work effectively.

 

4.     What Links Would you like?

I suggest as a starting off point (without much knowledge of what you want to accomplish) you use: Home, About, Contact, Merchandise, News, and Links.  These are pretty standard from page to page and hold the most interesting and sought after information, they are not all you should have though.  You need to tailor your site to what you want your browsers to know.

 

5.     Where on the page would you like the links placed?

On the Left side, Right side, Top, or Bottom?  I would deter you from just the bottom, but use the bottom as addition to the other place you have them.

 

6.    Do you want your link list on every link(page) you have?

Basically, if someone hit your news page by accident, and were interested enough not to hint the back button, you would need a list of where else you can look on the site.

 

7.     Would you like an intro page or do you want it to go straight to your opening page?

This can be anything from a flash intro to just an opening graphic.  Think of it in terms of a book, and the index page/opening page is your cover.

 

8.    What are your Copyright / Trademark years?

Do you have a copyright or trademark, if you don’t would you like a symbol on your page to scare people into thinking you do?  On certain sites people have the copyright symbol and the year they started to the current year.  Basically everything on the internet is copyrighted as yours unless someone published it to the net before you did.

 

9.    Do you want a counter?

A counter is a numbered box somewhere on your page that shows you the popularity of your site.  If you have it visible then everyone who views your site will know how many people have visited your page., if it is invisible you would log onto your counters page and track your results through their site.  If you decide on a counter you also have to decide on a counter graphic style which I will provide you  at a later date.  You will also need to know if you want a counter per hits per page or per hits per visit.

 

10. Do you want a message board?

This is a place where your visitors can leave messages for you and others to respond to which is viewable to all visitors.  You have the capabilities to block and delete any unwanted messages.

Website Questionnaire CON’T

 

11.     Do you want a guestbook?

Like the Message board, this is a place where your visitors can leave messages for you and others about their thoughts on your site which is viewable to all visitors.  You have the capabilities to block and delete any unwanted messages.

 

12.  if so, do you want it HTML accessible / Cuss words allowed?

You have the power to immediately eradicate any cuss words from the message as well as block anyone who tries to sign the guestbook using HTML - I don’t suggest blocking either.

 

13.  Do you want a mailing list?

This is great for people who are interested in having updates.  I suggest this if you plan on having more than two people on your mailing list (by mailing list I mean email list) and you plan to update them once or twice a month.

 

14.  Would you like a Free servers site or will you be buying a dotcom?

A Free Servers site is a site that is completely free with limited space available for free (eg. 8k.com, 20m.com).  They provide your name and server to upload it to but in order to have it free you have to be prepared for banners and pop-ups like mad!  If you want to go with the free servers site but aren’t crazy about the banners or pop-ups, you can pay a monthly fee by credit card only to your free server site ($7.95 monthly) and it will be pop-up and banner free.

 

 

If you want to buy a name, it is anywhere from $15.00 to $1000.00 dollars.  You will also need to have a Web Provider and A Server provider.  Some web hosting companies do both.  Verizon and Bcentral are examples of Server providers.  Verisign is the company to buy your name from (dotcom name).  And you have to have an internet service provider.  If you are on dial up then you could use MSN or earthlink, and if you are on cable modem then you can use Adelphia.

 

Have more questions?  I would too…just think about them and ask as you go along!