The Industry

Industry Article (Pg. 2)

But don't expect the experience to be a breeze. Even in the best of worlds, the process is likely to take a substantial chunk of your time. That's because you not only need to find the right company (or consultant) to build your website, but you also will have to spend time gathering - that is, writing - the content for the site and maybe coordinating photo shoots or trolling the web for stock photography and images.

Part of the challenge stems from a lack of understanding of what it takes to build a website. The task involves a variety of skills, including graphic design know-how and assorted areas of technical expertise. When you look at a much-trafficked website like Amazon or Flickr, you're looking at a project that's the product of scores of individuals with specialized skills - HTML coders and database experts, information architects and web designers, and on and on.

Does this mean the task is hopeless? Not at all. That's because a constellation of web-based services, free online tools and enthusiastic interactive agencies makes web development affordable these days, especially if you (or someone else at your business) is willing to act as the de facto project manager for the effort - and if you're not expecting to have a site with thousands of pages or complex databases working in the background.

If you had a lot of free time, or a very talented teenager in your household, you might want to try to put together a website for your business on your own. You could buy this kid a web page building tool, like Adobe's Dreamweaver, Microsoft's FrontPage or Apple's iWeb, and ask her to get moving, working with templates she downloads from one of the web's many sites with prefab designs.

Still, there's a big difference between building a website that looks pretty good on your own personal computer, and building one that's suitable on various web browsers, that's easily located and indexed by Google and other search engines, and that's easy to maintain and update.

Continue to Page THREE.