Your Company Here

A website is a basic necessity nowadays. Should you have a company, an NGO, a book, an event, a family, a hobby, a lot of pictures, or simply you want to say something to the people, you can let yourself be heard using the web.

We don't broadcast all our ideas on video, using broadband connection with high quality of picture and sound, that era is yet to come. Text content is better for the moment, because: It's searchable, instantly translateable, easy to access, easy to browse, easy to use.

Text can reach people faster and in larger quantity, since it's a low-cost product and the same low cost is required when stored.

Design

When we say something, it's not the same how we say it. In the same way, a written text can draw your attention, cheer you up, or even gain your trust just by the way it looks like. It's not about your favourite color or some very stylish fonts. The content altogether needs to be in harmony, with professional outlook, and this doesn't really depend on each visitor's personal taste.
There are plenty of texts to read on the Internet, so it's not sure that a visitor will decide to read your site. Before reading it, he doesn't know much about the content. But the design can tell him much if it is a good one.
Corners should be rounded, shapes should not always be rectangular (a picture of an object is preferred to have the shape of the object, having the web site's background around it), transparent pictures, gradient transitions can be used. New websites have less contrast and more borders everywhere.

Pictures

While the text is more precise, and can communicate intensely and with large details, the additional images have an emotional impact on the reader. They transmit the subjective aspects of the topic: the way it looks like, the way it feels like. Pictures are compulsory since they complement our textual information, adding life to the black letters.

Interactive features

Books have text, pictures and some design as well. But their great disadvantage is that the reader can't take part, can't change the course of events. People enjoy a lot in web content that they can choose where to go further, comment, revisit, communicate, and especially buy.

Visual effects

Most successful web sites have a twinkling header: a slideshow or a flash video. Getting used with the dynamism of the television, our eyes need much movement and inspiring new ideas are very appealing.

Movement can be automatic or based on the actions of the mouse. A drop-down list shouldn't just show up opened, but the few-seconds transitional dropping down is important for pleasing the eyes. Similarily, magnifying a picture looks better if it's transitional.

These belong to the features of the new-generational sites, called Web2.0, and described as "making web services lighter, faster, less cluttered and more appealing to the end user. A great user experience plays a big role today, in making users come back again to the web service" (TechPluto).

Usability

According to Jakob Nielsen, "Studies of user behavior on the Web find a low tolerance for difficult designs or slow sites. People don't want to wait. And they don't want to learn how to use a home page. There's no such thing as a training class or a manual for a web site. People have to be able to grasp the functioning of the site immediately after scanning the home page — for a few seconds at most."(Wikipedia)

A clear structure lets the user know in which way the content is categorized, what amount of content there is (whether he's reading just a summary or the actual text), and helps him find what he's interested in. The menu and the breadcrumbs provide a good navigational system.

Choosing an ideal font-size, inserting subtitles, edit the enumerations into a bulletted or numbered list, using bold fonts for emphasis will make your text easy-to-read.

It always occurs as a question, on what side the sidebar should be, where to put the logo, font-size selector, log-in form, ... It's true that there are customs that most pages follow, having similar positioning structure, and people learned them, so they instinctually look for some elements on a specific place (e.g. the contact is in the right end of the top menu). But in some aspects it's better not to be groovy, the site should be unique, and some elements can be placed just where you want it. This is recommended if the element is easily recognizable (e.g. the search box).

Experience matters. A template created by professionals follows these guidelines and implements practices based on the navigational habits of the masses. This is why my recommendation is a Joomla website, that has all the elements necessary for a website and still customizable enough to satisfy your own expectations.

In case you are a photographer and you need a photo gallery website, Jalbum is another good offer for you. It has albums, skins, titles, customizable design and an easy-to-use gallery editor with multilingual support.

Website hosting and domain registration

Most of the times these two services go together. Having a domain name means that your address will be yourcompany.com or similar. This is available for instance on GoDaddy, a good paid web hosting service.
There are also free webhosts, providing a sub-domain name, that looks like:
yourcompany.eu5.org or
yourcompany.xp3.biz
These two can be achieved from FreeWebHostingArea and this is the best service according to me. From other free hosts you can get addresses like:
yourcompany.site90.com
yourcompany.host-ed.net : a German host for smaller sites without Joomla