The corporate website or a web presence for any organization is increasingly becoming a necessity. In this article we provide you with the information, steps and tips that together would assist in the setting up of or creation of an effective web presence for your organization. Like a corporate office, an effective corporate website requires thoughtful planning. Understanding the entire process before you begin will save you time and money as the project progresses. Although sites range anywhere from just a few pages to more complex ones with hundreds of pages and sophisticated features, the development process remains similar. To begin with there are six basic stages in developing the website: planning, content development, graphic design, programming, marketing and promotion, and maintenance. Depending on your areas of expertise, you may need assistance for some or all phases of your project. Think like a home builder: first, develop a good blueprint, perhaps with the help of an architect; then hire individual contractors for the various tasks, or perhaps hire a general contractor. Let us now focus on the first stage – Planning.

Before the first code is written, you have to determine who the audience is for your site. This is critical, because many design and content decisions depend on this. Are visitors for your site senior professionals or technical people? Where does your target audience access the Net from, work or home? How fast is their Internet connection? Do they want to be informed or are they are looking at some amount of online support or transactions? Make sure you know the answers to these kind of questions from the outset.

Your site should be well organized, both for the benefit of your visitors and to make it easier to maintain. Map out your site in storyboard or schematic form, perhaps as a flow chart. Consider using index cards to represent the prospective web pages. You can rearrange them very quickly. It really helps to have some way to visualize the structure, whether you’re working alone, with colleagues or professionals.

Spend as much time as you can surfing the web at this stage. Take a close look at the websites you like. Many sites credit the design company and link to its website so you see what else the company has done. If you decide to hire outside help, make sure the company is experienced with projects of your size and scope. Bear in mind that a website is a perpetual work-in-progress. Most websites change fairly often because the technology makes electronic publishing rapid and relatively inexpensive. A well-planned site simplifies this process. New content and features can be easily added without having to redesign the site. Now, let us say you are ready with the blueprint of what you are going to have in the website. The next important stage is Developing the Content.

The content of your site will most likely be a combination of information that you currently have and information you will have to create or want to add. Typically many corporates also want their website to be a resource center in their particular industry. This may be the time when you should hire a web-savvy public relations pro to help you put into writing some of the concepts inherent in your company and its products and services.

One kind of content is customer service information. What questions do people ask most often? If you don’t have a list of frequently asked questions and answers, sit down alone, or with your staff and write one. Then post this information on your website. The more your customers can get answers from your site, the less time someone has to spend answering those same questions on the phone or in writing.

A content manager or project manager should be charged with the task of keeping track of the text, graphics, and programming necessary to create the content and get it online. This kind of help can be hired on a temporary basis if you don’t have the expertise on staff. This may also be a service that a “one-stop” web development company can provide.

The Web is a powerful medium that offers many ways to enhance your business or organization, especially if you add interactivity to your content mix. Consider creating forums to discuss issues and chat rooms where people can reach customer service or exchange tips with one another.

No matter how well organized and interesting your content, graphics set the tone. You can create a good impression with some well-designed graphics on the home page. Repeat a few design elements throughout the site to create a sense of continuity. This is just one of many common sense guidelines to follow in creating appealing pages. A good designer can be of enormous help.

The most important thing to keep in mind in choosing graphic designers is to work with professionals who understand the unique requirements of the Web. The technical limitations (and opportunities) of web pages are foreign to most graphic designers trained in other media. File size requirements, color limitations, and screen resolutions are much different from those in print. Even if you have an in-house graphics department, you may want to hire a Web-savvy graphic designer to bring your people up to speed on the demands of online design. In the interest of better web design, here are some tricks to improve graphic load time and presentation:

Be careful you don’t have images (such as a banner or a masthead) that run across the top of your screen and off the right-hand side of the monitor. This can happen if you are designing your web graphics using a high-resolution monitor. Many people have their monitors set to a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. If you’re working on a higher resolution monitor, chances are you’ve designed your mastheads or banners at a width of 570 pixels or more. At this width your graphic will spill off the right side of many screens, affecting the look and overall presentation of your pages. The best way to avoid this problem is to keep graphics at a width of 470 pixels or less.

Save images as “interlaced.” This allows a GIF to load into the browser as a fuzzy, pixelated picture that slowly comes into focus. Whether this is a pleasing effect is a matter of taste. Test your graphics both with and without interlacing to see for yourself how it looks.

If you are displaying large graphics, such as photos, give your readers the opportunity to decide if they want to see them or not. The best way to do this is to make a “thumbnail” or miniature version of the graphic, which links to a larger version of that image. The thumbnail gives readers a preview; if they are interested in seeing the larger version they can click on the thumbnail. It’s always a good idea to warn people if they are about to download a large (more than 50K) graphic by including the file size in parentheses next to the thumbnail.

Some Netscape extensions to the <img> tag can speed up downloading time for those viewing the Web with Navigator. If you specify the “height”and “width” of the graphic within the image tag, Netscape Navigator knows how much space to set aside for the graphic, and it begins downloading the text immediately. If you don’t specify these attributes, the browser will start calculating the image sizes first.

A border is displayed around each linked graphic. This border is the same color as all other links on the page. This may or may not be visually pleasing. If you don’t like the way it looks, you can suppress the border by adding “border=0” to the <img> tag. You can also add additional tags to align the graphic to the right or left of text or to the top, middle, or bottom of a graphic. These extensions are not universally supported and can result in your page layout looking different-even sloppy-in different browsers. Test your pages in several browsers to see how they look, then make adjustments as necessary. Finally, as a courtesy to people who are reading your pages in text-only mode, include an “alt” tag inside the image tag with a brief description of the graphic.

The best planned and designed website can still load and look radically different when viewed on different computers with different web browsers. So keep that in mind when designing and doing graphics. If you want to appeal to the widest possible audience however, your web pages should contain small graphic files and avoid the use of advanced features, such as Java, which are not universally supported. Keep in mind that you are designing in time as well as space, so take your users’ hardware into consideration. Right now, the average consumer is accessing the Web at modem speed, so your site should be geared to this. Ideally, your file sizes should be small enough to download in 15 seconds or less. [Recent studies indicate that 8 seconds is the optimum time.] The easiest solution is to keep your site simple and avoid those tempting “enhancements.” A good solution is to use a CGI script that evaluates the type of browser that is requesting a particular HTML file and builds an appropriate version of that file on the fly. While this option is complex and costly to implement, it is more efficient and much easier to maintain.

Once you have planned your site and created the content and graphics, you will need to convert text documents to HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and convert the graphics into GIF or JPEG format. Learning the basics of HTML is fairly easy. If you have only a few pages to create and some time on your hands, you can probably do it yourself. If you need help, you can hire an HTML coder. Software to convert text files to HTML (HTML editors) can be of great help. In fact with Microsoft Word you can save a document as an HTML file.

Once you begin working with forms, CGI scripts, image maps, or online transactions, you probably will need the services of a programmer. Programmers come in various price tags depending on the extent of coding required and the programmer’s experience/skills. Many web developers offer programming as part of their services. You can also find hundreds of programmers on the Net. Make sure you see some working examples of previous projects, no matter whom you hire.

Like a house, a website needs regular upkeep. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that once it’s online, it’s done. Maintenance generally means making sure that your files and file directory structures are up and running properly at all times and all your links are functional. Since HTML documents and their related graphic components are linked in specific ways, any changes or additions that you make to existing documents or directories could affect or alter their relationship to one another. The most common result is that links are broken, images get mixed up, or pages don’t load properly. User feedback, usually via e-mail, can play a big part in flagging these types of problems so they can be resolved in a timely manner.

Maintenance for a small site can take as little as two to three hours a month. On a large site, maintenance can be a full-time job. Be sure to incorporate the costs of maintenance into your budget during the planning phase so it doesn’t take you by surprise. If you’re planning a large, ambitious site or want to gradually add more content and functionality to it, working with an experienced designer and programmer from the outset can save you a lot of time and hassle later on. Starting with a well-designed site is the most effective way to prevent resource-intensive updates and maintenance.

Provide a way for users to give you feedback. The most common method is via e-mail. Use that information to identify and resolve technical problems in a timely manner. Use qualitative comments about the site along with usage tracking data to guide your decisions about what content to keep, replace, or improve.

If you’re pressed for time or resources, maintaining a simple database of all your pages, including a brief description of each page’s content, related links and graphics files, can be very helpful. As your site grows, or if you hand over maintenance to someone else, the database will come in handy. Software that uses this type of database to automate a lot of the updating is available.

A note of caution on the copyright front now. The net is a relatively new frontier and because of the unique nature of the digital media, some of the copyright laws that apply to printed material in the physical world don’t work as well in cyberspace. As a result, there are gray areas that are hotly debated. However, some general principles apply. If you think of a web page as an original creation, then it follows that you can’t reproduce it in whole or in part without the permission of the original creator. In general, local and international copyright laws protect text, graphics, animation and other intellectual property that is published on the Internet. You cannot use someone else’s work unless you first get clearance from the copyright owner. In many cases it may be difficult to determine who holds the copyright. See if there is a list of credits or copyright notice on the site. If not, try e-mailing the contact for the website. In many cases, this is the webmaster, who is usually a technical person who doesn’t deal with content-related issues. But he or she should be able to refer you to the right person. To protect yourself, be sure to obtain the rights in writing.

After you develop your website, you will have to decide where to host it. Your files should reside on a web server that is connected to the Internet 24 hours a day. The server can be a computer located in your home or office, or you can use a web hosting service. They take care of the technical details, allowing you to concentrate on publishing your site. Either way, there are pros and cons to consider.

When you are starting we recommend that to save time and money, initially one should start by placing their site with a hosting service. As the site becomes larger and more complex, you can reassess the situation to see if it makes sense to host the site in-house. With a hosting service you will not have to incur the expense of hardware or software, which are quite expensive irrespective of the configuration plus you also won’t have to hire someone to administer the site. If you don’t own your own hardware or already have dedicated staff, the difference in costs for your first year can be dramatic. Keep in mind that regardless of whether you do it yourself or go out-of-house, you are still responsible for the cost of generating your own content and maintaining the site.

The more traffic your site generates, the more expensive it becomes to use an out-of-house provider. If your company already has a robust computer system and an in-house system administrator who has the time to administer the site, running your own server might be a better option. Another option is co-location wherein a hosting service physically maintains your computer at their site. This is a good option if you can afford to buy your own equipment, but don’t want the hassle of maintaining a 24-hour per day, uninterrupted network connection.

In India, hosting services is a trouble area where there are no clear cost mechanisms available. And in many a case hosting providers can take you for a ride. So we strongly recommend that if you decide to go with a hosting service, find a stable, cost-effective, customer-friendly provider. Here are some questions to guide your decision:

How fast and reliable is their connection to the Internet? Do they guarantee 24-hour a day service and support? Do they have uninterrupted power supply and robust back-up systems?
How long have they been in business? How many employees do they have? (like avoid one-man start-up operations.) How many megabytes of data storage are you allowed? Are there extra charges for a high volume of traffic to your site? What kind of traffic log reports does the hosting service provide? How will you update your pages? Do you have FTP access?
Does the hosting service support CGI so you can use forms, database searches and image maps? What are the provisions for security and keeping out hackers?

Hope this serves you as a guide in developing an effective corporate website for your organization. Best of luck!

(The article is written by the prhub team which specializes in building corporate websites. More queries can be mailed to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )

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