Now that you’ve got a “www.name”, the next question becomes what are you going to put there?  There is nothing like a blank slate to kill any creativity that you might have thought you had.  And this is where people usually stall out, but don’t give up now!  This is the good part.

You already have the basics. You just have to organize that information into a logical structure.  We won’t get really bogged down here, but we do need to start with something.  Open a Word doc and make a few notes.

• Home Page information: It’s time to start thinking about your home page content.  I can’t offer as much specific info. as I’d like because different businesses/ organizations need different focuses.  That’s where Google comes in handy!  Google other organizations like yours to see what kinds of things they feature on their homepage.
  For churches, I ask what events are coming up?  If they are starting a new bible study series?  If they are expecting a special guest or hosting a concert?  What information would help a visitor get oriented to the church quickly?  All those headliners are great for front page content.
  For companies, I ask about special promotions, sales, hot news, etc.
  I don’t know exactly what you want to be on your first page…but even if you don’t know either.  Don’t panic and don’t stop!!!!!  Put it to the side and come back later.
• Contact information: You need a contact page with your business name, address, phone, fax, etc.  on it.  You will need to include email addresses too.  Before you drop in your yahoo email, remember that your site hosting plan comes with email addresses.  Once we get back to the web, you can create your new email address @ your own domain.  It’s much more professional.
• Product/ Services page(s):  If you sell products, you are gonna want to have pages for them.  If you sell services, you’ll want to explain your services to people on related pages.  At this point, consider what you’ll put there.  Again….don’t get overwhelmed here.  If you’ve got 50 products and they aren’t digitized in any way yet…that’s okay.  You can grow as you go.  Don’t get stuck thinking you need to type up product descriptions for each product before you can move on.
• Calendar of events:  If your group or organization has a lot of things coming and going a calendar of events might be invaluable to help connect with folks all over the web.  My recommendation is Google Calendars because they are free and easy to include into your own website, but the tool is somewhat irrelevant now.  The goal is to consider if you’ll have calendar events and to jot them down.
• Extra Information:  You might have an information category that I’ve not thought of or considered here.  Just jot it down in your document under a section with it’s own name.  We will determine where to put it later.  The goal here is just to keep you moving forward with thoughts, but not to overwhelm you so much that you stop.  So if you’ve got thoughts on content, great, write’em down.  If you don’t, no problem, just write what you have and keep moving to the next post.

Step One -Get a Domain Name And Web Space
Step Two – Consider Your Content
Step Three- Set Up your Website
Step Four- Consider your Design
Step Five- Turn a Blog into a Site
Step Six – Add A Calendar
Step Seven – Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Extra Credit- Adding A Podcast