WS - How Creative Web Design Enhances Your Business

Now let's focus on the content and information a personal web site should have in order to be attractive to users.

Like any other web site, an image says more than one thousand words, so you should definitely have images of yourself, your hobbies, or the related topics that are expressed in your web site. It's not a good idea to have a huge image gallery, but yes, to have one image that is frequently updated.

Also, you can spice up the site with other kinds of media, videos of your own, of your friends, and even you can research about adding an online web cam that allows visitors to watch you online with your permission. Internet experts say that one of the most amazing things the internet future has community building. That means joining a set of people with common interests in order to build a community around that topic. A web site is a good place to do that.

The reason is that, for example, if you have a particular interest in sea turtles, maybe your circle of friends, and your family and even at school you cannot find anyone with the same interest. But guess what happens if you create a good site about yourself with your principal interest set to sea turtles?

If you do it right, position it correctly in search engines, and provide interesting content, in a few months you will have built a worldwide sea turtle community. You will be able to talk about sea turtle food, how they swim, where they go, how they reproduce and a huge list of topics that you never imagined there would be other persons interested in. It is very common for every person to have one or two main areas of interests, so personal web sites often end in that specific topic for a web site.

The first rule you have to follow in order to keep your site interesting is, UPDATE it. A web site needs A LOT of maintenance. The more often you update it, the more often you must add new content to it, the more interesting it will be. Imagine visiting the site of a person one day, but you check the next day and see the same content, and the same the next day; the most likely thing to happen will be that you won't visit it anymore.

Keep this in mind: UPDATE is basic for a personal website. There are also sets of features that will help your personal web site be interesting. You should provide some kind of interaction not only between visitors and you, but between the visitors themselves, too. A good place to start is a visitors' book, where they post their comments. You can select either those comments that are to be viewed just by you, or those that are to be posted in your site. That provides a good interaction between all the persons who visit and use your site.

You should make your best efforts to build your community. You have to add links to your community members to make the community stronger. Be sure your community members add links to your site and provide a "recommendation of this site to a friend".

As with every good thing, there are certain things you should be aware of. A personal web site is very personal, and it will talk about you. You will be providing information, expressing feelings and thoughts to the whole world.

Be sure all the info you provide won't hurt or bother anyone, and most importantly, that it won't cause you problems. It's not a good idea to publish your address or phone number. You should send that info to the specific person you want to have that info, but never make it accessible to everyone.

In conclusion, going through a personal web site development project is a step everybody who is interested in the internet should take. It will be very big fun and an interesting process.

Source: Ezine

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