by Susan Kliebenstein

Created on: November 03, 2008

Have you been thinking about creating your own web site? If you have there are several questions you should ask yourself before beginning.

Do you have something to share?

Do you have ideas or know-how to share? Have you done a lot of research on a particular topic? Are your photographs the envy of your social milieu? Are you making or selling something that people want? In short you must know if you have a purpose that is worthy of the time you will spend creating and maintaining a web site.

Are you willing to invest the time to maintain your own website?

Keeping your web presence fresh and your information up-to-date is very important. The web is overflowing with pages advertising events that happened 5 years ago, and articles that contain out-dated information, because too many sites haven't been updated since they were launched. Maintenance means deleting pages that are no longer germane, adding information frequently, and updating pages that need to reflect the most current discoveries.

Are you willing to learn about markup languages?

If you are not willing to invest some time in learning how to write the code necessary to put a web page together you will be at the mercy of a WYSIWYG editor, or a hired helper. Hiring someone to put your page together will be essential for some complex interactive websites, but for basic presentation of information you should be able to do the work yourself. Relying on a webpage editor will surely lead you eventually to a mess you cannot get out of without knowing something about HTML, Java or other basic web building skills. It's OK to use a page builder program, but the output of most is very verbose. In order to keep your code slim and readable it's best to learn to write it yourself. HTML is not a difficult language to learn. The basics can easily be mastered in 15 minutes to an hour.

How will the material be organized?

Once you've decided to take the plunge and build your website, do take some time to plan it out. What pages will link to what other pages? Will there be menus, galleries, polls, quizzes, video, audio, articles, links, etc. The Internet is such a flexible medium, that your ideas about presentation can remain simple, but may also expand freely to captivate your audience. Don't become overwhelmed when you realize that you could have 35 or 50 or even 200 pages. Most pages can be built in just a few minutes. You can fill the places with a "Not Ready Yet" page until your pages are complete. What is important is that

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