Make your business PART ONE By Larissa Choma

When you think, "Internet," what is the first thing that comes to your mind? E-commerce? Music? News? Socializing? Blogging? Those are all good places to start. You could create a website that's dedicated to your favorite band, and have a chat area where people can talk about it. If you're a news junkie, or want something less filtered than traditional media, build a website and get publicly available feeds from news providers such as Reuters, BBC, AP, and others. Build your own customized news aggregator (what used to go by the quaint name of "newspaper"), then see and show all the news that's fit to 

Create a site about your family, life, friends and times. Granted, the world may not beat a path to your website with that topic, but your friends and family will! You can have a page for you, your spouse, your kids—even crazy old Uncle Ernie and his trained iguana. Or maybe a section that explores your family tree. Instead of sending out that yearly "family update" during the holidays, you can post it on your site.

Make a plan. Building your website is going to take a commitment of time and money, so set a limit on both, and then dig in. The first thing you want to do after you have your idea and are ready to build a website is to plan it out. This doesn't have to be a big, complicated spreadsheet, or a fancy graphic presentation, but at the very least, you will want to know what goes where.

• Draw a flow chart. For most people, the website starts on the home page. This is the page that everybody sees when they first go to www.yourSite.com. But where do they go from there? If you spend some time thinking about how people might interact with your site, you'll have a much easier time down the line when you are making navigation buttons and links.
• Make it happen. When you have the basic idea down and have a plan for how it will be laid out, the next thing you'll want to think about is how you're going to build it. The options seem mind-boggling, and people will try to sell you this, and that, and every other thing that you "absolutely must have" on your site. When you get right down to it, though, there are only a few basic choices to make. 

Larissa Choma 

Tech Consultant 

USA