Free Website Guides

1. Planning Your Website

What is your website about?

A nice simple question but one that will impact upon everything else you do. Even the biggest of sites can be summarised easily and ideally you can describe what your site is about in one simple sentence.

As you build your site you will be tempted by shiny new widgets or flashy graphics you stumble across which can easily lead to you going off topic or creating a confused site.

The answer to this question is essentially your mission statement and will help you to maintain focus throughout the development process.  

Download Planning Your Website 

2. Building Your Website HTML & CSS

This guide is primarily aimed at people building their first web site and those who have tried in the past but struggled with some of the technical terms and processes. It will not take you from a beginner through to becoming an HTML & CSS guru, there are plenty of resources online to help you do that (see the resources page). What is will do is introduce you to the concepts behind building a web site for you to hopefully grab hold of and run with.  

Download Building Your Website 

3. Improving your website

Gathering the data

Web analytics 

Before you can make any changes to your website you first need to understand how your website is being used (or not). Adding web analytics script to the areas of your website you want to track and monitor (ideally all of it) will enable you to report on:  

Download Improving Your Website 

4. Marketing your website

Online marketing 

This section will start by covering search engine marketing (SEM) which includes search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) advertising. It will then move on to affiliate marketing, directories, Email marketing, advertising networks and finally social media

Download Marketing Your Website