Build a Home Based Business from scratch selling products online using Drop Shippers.

Design Your Web Site Template

Go through your list of competitors and ask yourself these questions –

1. What do I like about this site?
2. What don’t I like about this site?
3. Do I like the colour schemes?
4. Is it easy to navigate and find my way around?
5. Are there any graphics or designs that look good to me?
6. Do they use a logo and a banner at the top of every page?
7. What other information pages do they have such as ‘Shipping & Returns’ and so on?

Take lots of notes and after a while, you’ll hopefully start to visualize how you want your site to look and feel like.

Your first step is to design a logo. Think of something that is unique, yet simple and will be remembered. You only have to look at logos by Coca Cola and Nike to understand the power of simple, but you will probably want to incorporate part of your website’s theme into the logo.

Next design your banner, which is a combination of your logo or some other graphics, and some text. You will notice a lot of sites have a banner at the top of each page incorporating the logo and the title of their site being the text.

To design your logo and banner will either require some sort of program such as Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop, or you can pay someone else to do it for you. A good site is The Logo Company for logos and graphics.

Next you want to choose a colour scheme that involves two to three colours but no more than four. Once again, the research on your competitors should help you decide this.

Choose one of the colours as the background throughout your site. You’re probably best off leaving the guts of your page white, where all your text and graphics will go, but for the outside, choose a colour to use throughout the whole of your site.

Choose one of your other colours for the headings and because you’re going to have a side bar, you could use this same colour for all your side bar links, or if you’d prefer, use another colour.

The idea is to have the same feel throughout your site so that from a distance every page will look similar, especially the top and the background.

Your side navigation is quite important because it is where you have most of your major links such as your categories and your information pages. This is also a common section that should be visible on every page. If you purchase a web e-commerce package, you should find that they offer this as part of your web site design.
You’ll also find with most packages they’ll offer several templates for web site design that will have a layout including a colour scheme, side bar navigation and even banners.

I’m sure what you’ll find when looking through other websites is that the theme for every page is the same background, the same banner and logo, the same side navigation bar, usually on the left, and the same colours for major headings etc. Because of this I encourage you to do the same. The meat of your pages is where you’ll be adding a lot of different text and pictures.

Tasks:

1. List your likes and dislikes from all your competitors.
2. Design a logo and banner.
3. Choose a colour scheme.

Constructing Web Site