Infosites provide information in a variety of ways. Building a site that gives good original information on a topic you enjoy is a big task, but can be broken down into manageable parts.

Infosites exist for many reasons, ranging from the desire to inform, the desire to share, the desire to find others who share your interests, to the desire to make money either directly or indirectly from the site. It does not matter whether the site is developed out of a personal interest or a financial one, the issues are the same.

The first thing you need to do is pick your topic. Maybe you have done that, maybe you need to refine the topic, or maybe not. Choose a topic that you enjoy, and that you know enough about to be able to put together a useful and accurate resource. Then follow these steps to get ready to set up your site:

1. Determine the purpose of your site. Do you need it to make money, or do you want to do it for personal reasons with no expectation of return?

2. Decide what kinds of information you want to provide. You can combine many types of information on a single site, as long as they deal with a common theme. Make sure your topic has the potential to actually achieve your purpose. Here are some options:

• Original Articles - by you or by others
• Opinions - yours or collected from visitors
• Instructions - lessons, recipes, tips, self help, anything that instructs people on how to do something better
• Reviews - reviews of books, movies, music, websites, software, the arts, etc.
• Stories - yours or collected from others
• Current Events - local or regional, your own reporting, or collected from others
• Links - searched out from all over the web and categorized on your site

3. Determine the target market. Figure out who your average visitor is going to be, and what kind of place they would want to visit.

4. Design your site template, get your web space and domain name, lay a good foundation to build your site on. Read up on building a website in our other instructional booklets on the Shoestring Startups page of the SuperMom website. Make sure you put Designed By and Copyright info at the bottom of each page! We recommend iPowerWeb for webspace, they host our site and provide an unequaled service for small businesses that need room to grow. Create your site template with a design for two levels of navigation - Major pages in one navigation bar, and subnavigation for branches off of the major pages in another navigation bar. Put those each in a logical place that will be consistent through the entire site. Remember, your home page needs only the major page navigation bar, while all the rest need the subnavigation also, but only what applies to the category the page is in.

5. Make a site outline. Divide your information into logical sections. Make sure each topic will have enough in it to justify a whole page, otherwise combine it under something else. If a topic is too big for a single page, create a sub-section with more pages under the general topic. In general, a good info-site should have 4-12 major categories, and each of those should have 2-10 subcategories. Your navigation, mentioned in item #4, needs to correlate with your site outline.

6. Put your links to all major topic pages into your website, along with Contact, About (who you are and why you are doing this), Links, Terms of Use or Policies, FAQ, Email, and other standard links. Give the links the names you intend to give the pages.

7. Duplicate the template to make all of the pages you planned out. Make sure the names match the links! Ok, it is easiest to make a home page first, and put all the major navigation, standard links, major page links, and meta tags or anything else that is the same for all the pages. Duplicate THAT page, and then add in a subnavigation bar, either below the original, on the side, at the top, on the opposite side, above the page topic, etc. The subnavigation needs to be flexible enough to accomodate different numbers of links since all categories won't have the same number of pages linked to them. When that is set, then duplicate that page to create all of your major category pages. Put in your major category page headings, and customize the links on all of those pages, and THEN duplicate those pages for the subcategories under them. This minimizes your workload, and lets you get the most out of the time you expend on site design and page layout.

8. Put your page headings in place. (Some of this comes in the duplication process as outlined above.) You should have your site name or logo at the top of each page. Below that, put the page topic. You can also write a short description of what you intend to put there to serve as a reminder for yourself. Do not put "under construction" or "coming soon"! If you are going to upload and register the page before all of the pages are finished, then make your page description long enough to serve as a place holder so the precipitous visitor will know you do intend to put something of value there, and what it might be!

9. Start writing content. Gather your links to other sites, write your reviews or whatever. More on getting content further down the page. You should be assembling your content and putting it on your pages though.

10. Add images where you can. Images can make a site more friendly, as long as there are not so many that it slows down the site too much.

11. Upload the site, test it, register it, promote it, etc. There are instructions on this on the Shoestring Startups page.

12. Put in a counter if you want one. Invisible counters let you track visitors without having the numbers visible to the public.

13. Add in Site Search if you choose. You can do this with Google, or with JavaScript. This is not the same as Item Search, it does not return a specific item like a product or article or review, it just shows the pages that the keywords were found on. This can still be a useful function for a large infosite.

14. Put in Ads. These come last. You can try Google AdSense if you like, but you need to have your site fully functional before you do this.

15. Keep it fresh. You need to make sure your site design and methods of updating give an easy means to tell what is new and what is old. More on that in a bit too. Updating content and keeping the site fresh and changing is necessary if you want a dynamic site. If all you want is to put it out there and see who finds it, fine. But if you want repeat visitors, you need to keep it changing with new things.

Ok, now some pointers on what will make it work or not.

It is all about Content. If you have information that people want, they will come as long as they can find the site. If you have regularly changing content, and they like what is coming, they will return. Content is one of the buzzwords online. There are some things you need to know.

Copyright Laws - You cannot quote someone else for more than a sentence without their permission. You can generally link someone else's site to yours, after all, that is free advertising for them. If you got the URL to a private or personal site though, you must ask before you link.

Scrounging Free Content - Free content pretty much always has a price. The price online is ads. You can get many experts to write an article for you if you let them put in a signature line linking back to their site. Many professional free services exist on just this principle also, if they provide you with free content they get to include an ad link. Be warned though, that if you use too much of this, your site will lack originality.

Original Content - What can you give the public that no one else can? Your opinions (if they are unique, but appreciated by many) are individual. Your hand written articles, if they are well informed and well written, can be powerful original content. The best content is stuff that you ask others for personally, or that you write yourself, because there is no doubt of its originality.

Trust - If you are writing instructional material, reviews, or anything that requires that people trust you, you need to create an environment that encourages that. Your information first of all must be accurate, dependable, and sensitive to differences in taste and reactions. You have to write well also, or you will not sound intelligent enough to be trying to instruct anyone!

More (enough to keep them coming back) - There are two ways you can get repeat visitors - the first is by having so much information that your site becomes a static reference site. In other words, except for updates due to progress or to keep the site looking fresh, you don't have to add anything after a while, but you have to have enough resources there to keep people coming back to find another tidbit or to reference it when they need. HTML guides, encyclopedias, and historical sites are examples of topics that can work well this way. The second way is to add new content regularly.

If you add content, you need to think about two things: How are you going to structure your site so that new information can be found easily by return visitors? Can you create a page for new listings? Do you want to label new items with a NEW label? Do you want to add new content at the top of the page so return visitors can read down until they get to what they read before? Do you want to archive old content and only leave the new stuff on the regular pages? Which method do you want to choose to manage the site so that new content is separate from old?

How often are you going to update the site? Once a day? Once a week? or Once a month? You really need to have a regular schedule so that your visitors have an idea of how often they should check back.

Links - If you make a site that is mostly links, it is not likely to be real successful. Directories and reference link sites are rampant on the web. Some make it, some don't. The ones that do are just a bit more than a link site. Make the links searchable, put descriptions or opinions with each of the links, or provide articles along side the link pages. Do SOMETHING to make it more than just a dry listing of links that mean nothing. And Google says no more than about 100 links per page.

Provide a means for Feedback. This is important with an infosite, because if you have instructions, you need to provide a way for people to let you know if they don't make sense. If you do opinions, you can gather opinions from others through a feedback email link or form. Those, in turn, can provide additional content for your site. Even if you have an instructional or review site, good opinions from other people can be posted (with their permission) in the sidebar, to increase a feeling of credibility or trust. And finally, having a means to contact you available on each page makes you feel more friendly, which makes people like you better. They come back when it feels like you care what they think.

Site Structure - Keep it logical. Generally a tree type of layout is best for an info site, with categories, and subcategories. You can create 5-15 sub-pages off each topic page. More than that gets too confusing. Less than that may not justify the subcategory. And don't go deeper than about three levels. That gets too confusing too! It is really easy to create an infosite that ends up being 150 pages or so by this method. As long as your topics are good ones, filling them up is not as difficult as it seems either. In fact, choosing your topics and sub-topics well will put you well on the way to filling them.

A good site need not be complex, and it need not have a lot of expensive or complex features. It does need to have a professional appearance, and solid information - of the two, the information is the most critical - glitz without substance does not keep your visitors interested. You can, over time, add more features such as guestbooks, interactive pages, feedback forms, surveys, bulletin boards, a gallery, or other areas where your visitors can more actively participate. You can add Javascript to cause the pages to behave in a certain way also. BUT, each thing you add to the page will change not only how the page behaves, but how long the page takes to show up. Don't put in any features that do not justify the extra delay. Read our instructional booklet on Common Mistakes to Avoid to make sure you are not annoying your guests with the neat new thing you just learned to do!

Infosites of all kinds are everywhere. You may feel there is not room for one more. Maybe there isn't. Then again, maybe they are like grains of sand on the beach. Someone has just as much of a chance of sifting out yours as anyone else's.

Use the instructions in our other booklets too, to market and differentiate your site, to build it well, add features, etc. Get your foundation right from the start, and you can build on it with a minumum of tedious work and hassle later on.

Adventure Tech-Web offers web design, consulting, and maintenance training services, along with graphic design, proofreading, copy writing, and other small business services to help you build an effective site. Ask us for a quote before you decide you cannot afford it.