Thinking of starting a website? Before you chat to a website designer, you can create your own draft website just using a word document. This will be the kind of information your website designer will be requiring from you, so you can be prepared – which will save time and money, and allow for a more accurate quote.

Open a new document and consider page one as the home page. Decide what you need to say –what will your main heading be? What will you say in your first paragraph? This exercise will force you to focus on what you have to offer your customers, and it will give you an idea of how much information you will need to provide in order to give a complete overview of your business.

Create a new page for each section of your website. You may include a page for each product or service you offer, or just have one page as an overview of all your products or services. The contact page can be straightforward – just list all the methods of contacting your business.

Have a look at other websites in your industry to get ideas, and think about what it is that you like about your favourite websites. Communicate all this to your website designer to will help ensure that you get the most value from your website.

I know people who have tried to send an email to a website address: www.example.com, or tried to visit the website of an email address: fred@example.com. The problem is not always evident to new computer users. So how can you tell an email address from a website address? The simplest way to tell the difference is an email address always contains the ‘at sign’ (@), and a website address never does.
Email addresses should be written in lower case eg. fredsmith@example.com. Sometimes you will see an email address written in mixed case (FredSmith@example.com) to improve readability.