Web Hosting Info

When designing your website, you need to remember that there are still lots of people on slow internet connections. Over 65% of users connect at speeds between 28K and 1Meg bits/second.

It is therefore important that you keep your website simple. The simpler the better. If your website takes more than 3-4 seconds to load, people will just leave. Try keep your web page size small, less than 15k if you can. Look at Google and how simple works for them. So when designing a site, follow the KISS principle: Keep it simple stupid.

Having just content on its own can be rather boring. You may want to have more functions on your site other than content.

Some features of sites you may be interested in adding:

Newsletters
This is a great way of contacting your regular visitors easily and quickly. You can add a form on your site which guests enter their email to get a weekly/monthly newsletter. Benefits of a newsletter is that you can send them out for free and it reminds people about your site. However you don’t want to have your guests regarding your site as sending spam.

Scripts to Checkout;

http://www.phplist.com/  - Free

Forum/Messageboard 

Forums allow other users to post messages and intereact with you and other users. They can post additional information to your site and exchange ideas.  They connect users from all around the world who have similar interests. However forums are high maintenence and at first it is difficult to get alot of posts. Also they are targetted by spammers

Scripts to Checkout

http://phpBB.com - Free
http://punbb.org/- Free
http://vbulletin.com - Paid

I’ve used both phpBB and vBulletin and highly reccommend vBulletin if it is within budget.

There are billions of ideas for websites on the Internet. Do some research to make sure it hasn’t been done before. However if it has, what can you do to make it better or faster than them? It’s likely that your idea has already been done before so you best research them a bit to see what your up against.

Google them.
Find out what others are saying about the site and what they complain about etc. See what topics they write about and start networking with them.

What sort of traffic do they get? 

Find out if they get many website views, Alexa allows you to check their traffic so you know more information about your competition, although these stats aren’t the most accurate in the world