Structure Your Website To Fit A Ezine

By Steven Boaze
Posted Monday, August 16, 2004

The single most important step before you begin designing your website is defining the structure and purpose of your site. if you know that your website is going to be for your ezine ( which this is the correct way) there must be a structure involved and a general purpose chosen for your site. having a ezine without a website will most likely cause you to fail.

In the early days of the internet ezines were emailed out when people couldn't afford websites especially the hosting for it. if someone wanted to subscribe to a particular ezine they had to send an email to a autoresponder which in turn sent the ezine back at them in their email. this was the early days when the old "Fanzine" was popular. this "Fan Magazine" was established only to have fun transferring pictures,jokes, articles, quick messages etc...

Today there are numerous ezines on the internet and all of those who are successful with their publication have a website to support it. if you think that you don't need a website to own and operate a successful ezine then you can definitely go ahead and plan to fail. with the new spam laws in place today this makes it impossible not to have a website. there are disclaimers and rules to go by in order for your subscribers to adhere with the new spam law agreements and there must be a website in place to support unsubscriptions and subscribe methods as well.

Take some time to sit down and figure out what you want your website to do.create some goals for your site like: increase sales leads, generate more traffic into your store or business or plainly broaden your marketing efforts. these are all reasonable expectations, but match them to your specific business needs. without a good idea of what you're looking for out of a website, you have no idea, really how to begin piecing one together. on the other hand, a clear set of objectives will help you keep sense of perspective and purpose about your website and lead to a more effective and cohesive result.

Once you have decided what to include on your site you need to sketch out it's organization. draw a quick map of your site and how the pages will fit together. start with the front page, list all of the links that will go on it, and map out the content of each subsequent page. one useful approach is to diagram this structure. doing so will help you visualize the path that customers will take to each area of your site and each item of content. your content priorities will come in handy here: The most important information should be nearest to the top (requiring less clicks reach), but you also don't want to overwhelm any one page with too many links. a good rule of thumb is to put no more than six links on a page and avoid burying anything more than three levels deep.

About The Author
Steven Boaze (CEO) is The Owner of The Corporate Headquarters Boaze.com Which houses and controls four companies (Web Development Technology - (www.webdevelopmenttechnology.com)) (Boaze Publishing - (www.boazepublishing.biz))
(Business Marketing Guide - (www.businessmarketingguide.com)) (Ezine Remedy- (www.ezineremedy.com)) Steven is also the author of "Hidden Secrets To Business Marketing" Ebook along with numerous articles on Marketing and Advertising published by Boaze Publishing. Copyright © 1998-2003 Boaze.com