I have developing several websites, some of them are aimed to get the financial benefit. This article is explained the website development based on my experience. Developing a website for now on is very easy due to many web application and resources available. But developing a website that provides many benefits is very difficult and not many people can do that. We could see that there are many dotcom companies were failed to success. In this article I will explain about how to make a website that provides benefits for both users and website provider.
GOOD PLAN
The most important think for making a good website is a good plan. The bad plan will produce loosing time and money for redeveloped website from the beginning. A plan for developing a website covers:
The powerfull website should have minimum requirement features to make the website become valuable to both users and website provider. The minimum requirements for a good website are:
I will discusse each topic of minimum requirement in more detail.
From now on, it is not efficient anymore to write the html code for each page of our website. Beside html can only be used as static website, the further development is also very difficult. Therefore we have to use an already done software for the website.
The software for the website are various depending on what we need for the website. One website also possible to have more than one software to fulfill the requirement. Fortunately, there are many free software for the website, these software can be called Content Management System or CMS. Using Content Management System, the website is very flexible and easy to extend. We can put text editor that seems like Microsoft Word, give search facility, take care the user, manage the content, add gallery, file management and much more.
The CMS can be divided to the purpose of the software. The following part is the software main purpose and the example software for it:
Forum:
Simple Machine Forum
phpBB
Wiki (like wikipedia):
MediaWiki
Content Management System:
Drupal
Joomla
Blog
Wordpress
Online Marketing:
VirtueMart
The typical installation for those software are almost the same. Before we can install those software, we should know the requirement for the software. Typical requirement of the mentioned software above are:
1. Webserver that has capability to process php script
2. mySQL
3. Enough space to store the CMS code
The installation are mostly the same as in the following steps:
1. Make a data base to store the data (everything is automatically done by the software)
2. Create a user for the data base (remember the user name and its password)
3. Insert user to the data base that we have created
4. Give full access to the user
5. Download the source code of the software
6. Upload using ftp software like Filezilla to the webserver
7. Visit our new website, for example: www.example.com
8. Usualy the software is already running and go to the installation procedure
9. Put the setting for the new website
10. Clean up everything by deleting the installation files and change the files/folders attribute for the safety
11. Done
The Content Management System in the form of Forum is a software for a website with purposing to manage the discussion between users. The website can have many topic for the forum with one main topic for each website. The example for the topics are hobby, technology, computer and more. Each user can send his/her question/answer/news to the website and the other user can reply or gives other opinion.
The webmaster manage the topic of the discussion in the discussion boards. And the Forum Content Management System (CMS) will take care the data processing using a data base. Forum CMS will strore the discussion data with their corresponded writer, topic, time and so on to the data base. The other user can read the written discussion and can join the discussion by replying the messages.
The websites based forum usually have an administrator or more if the users are in a huge number. Administrator control the messages, users, board topic, avatar, award/karma and some more detail. If there are users that sent undesired message, administrator can ban the user. The messages that are not in the proper board can be also moved to the proper board.
There are several Forum based CMS, some of them are:
1. Simple Machine Forum
2. phpBB
and some pure Content Management System usually have forum module as default like
3. Drupal
4. Joomla
5. Mamboo