This course covers all the topics everyone faces -- or should face -- when putting up that first purposeful site, from how to select and organize content to logistical concerns, such as where to have your site hosted, to implementing e-commerce on a small business site.

What is a website?

It may seem like a pretty basic question, but it's best to get this definition out of the way right off the bat so as to avoid confusion later. When we talk about websites in this course, we're talking about a collection of related documents on the web that are linked together and share a beginning file called a homepage. Web pages are the individual documents that are linked together to form a website.

Because this course is about building websites (not pages), you won't spend a lot of time on the technical workings of web pages and the Internet -- such as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CGI (Common Gateway Interface), JavaScript, and the hundreds of other protocols and languages that make the web work. The goal of this course is to prove to you that it's entirely possible to build a good first site without being a supergeek.

This is not to say there's no point to learning to build sites the "hard" way. Anyone considering a career in website development is encouraged to learn about the more technical aspects of the web. However, because this is your first site, it should be as much fun and as easy as possible.

What's the big idea?

You can't write a book unless you have some idea what that book is going to be about. You can't write a song without a clue as to what you want to sing about. In the same way, you can't design your own website unless you first know why you're creating the website and what's going to be on it.

There are countless reasons for building a website. Examples of reasons you might build a website include:

• Marketing your business
• Selling products or services
• Publishing your ideas (or musings) to be read by a global audience
• Showing off your children or grandchildren
• Showing off yourself

Your reason for building a website can be compared to a business's mission statement, which describes a company's reason for existence. Simply put, a mission statement tells the folks reading it just what a business is all about -- or at least what the business wants people to think they're all about. Examples of business mission statements might include:

• "We sell cars at the lowest prices"
• "Our mission is to provide the latest information on cures for blue-footed pigeon disease"
• "All music, all the time"

Your first task in creating your site is to write your website's mission statement.

What's your mission?

Mission statements can be as short as a sentence or as long as a paragraph. To write your own mission statement, sit down, get comfortable, and put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Try to describe your website's theme concisely in no more than one paragraph. To make it even harder, your goal is to adhere to a word limit -- use no more than 65 words.

The heart of your website

The point of this lesson is to help you find your focus before you start designing your website. Browse the Internet long enough and you'll see plenty of sites that try to do an awful lot and are often confusing as a result. Some sites, such as Yahoo! or Amazon.com, actually succeed with this model. However, what works for a large Internet portal or shopping site almost certainly won't work for an individual web publisher or a small business owner. The reason is simple: they have the resources to successfully manage enormous amounts of content and hundreds of different products. Chances are good that you don't.

To avoid getting bogged down in endless busy-work and ending up with a site that no one can understand, decide on the central purpose of your site. With your mission statement in hand, you're almost ready to start your website construction. In the next section, you learn what kind of content you need to gather to give your website some meat and substance.