Time saving tips when building your website

Have you ever found yourself spending more time creating and maintaining your website than you at first expected? Below you'll find various tips that can help you save time and make the entire process much easier.

Plan for the outcome you want to achieve

Know exactly where your project should be heading before you begin. If you do not, as you progress you will spend a lot of time trying to integrate an increasing number of new ideas without first focusing on getting the site ready for launch.

Websites created without proper planning can also confuse visitors, because the site might contain too much information or it might have an unintuitive structure.

If you are creating a personal website for yourself, the planning process might be as simple as drawing a page design on paper and making a list of pages your site should contain. In the case of larger sites, you might adopt a more formal approach involving a research process.

Break larger tasks into smaller steps

Large projects can sometimes seem overwhelming unless you break them down into smaller steps. Allocate realistic time frames to each step, factor in additional time for any problems you might encounter, and don't forget to allocate breaks and time away from the project for yourself. You might be able to build your site so that it can be created as an ongoing process with an early launch and more areas added progressively over time as they are completed.

If necessary, prioritize your work, and where possible, try to multitask.

Make lists of procedures

Building and maintaining websites sometimes involves repetitive tasks, such as configuring scripts, creating mailboxes, downloading log files, renewing domain names, and adding new webpages (including updating your site map files). Creating a list of steps to take for commonly performed tasks reduces the risk of a mistake being made, makes it easier for someone else to perform the tasks if required, and gives your website more value if you decide to sell it in the future.

Write a style guide booklet

Not to be confused with "style sheets" (discussed later), style guides are often used by large corporations, but they are just as useful even for private websites. Style guides are booklets containing comprehensive details of how all material you publish should look. Information they contain might include what fonts to use, how to structure hyperlinks, hexadecimal values for colours used on your site, how to display images and so on. Your style guide might even extend to non-website material such as stationery. This ensures that visitors are exposed to a consistent "brand image" for your website or business.

Implement style sheets

Chances are that you are already using style sheets in your website. If not, consider adding them because they'll save you a lot of work. Style sheets are files that contain formatting instructions for your site. By making changes to your site's style sheet, you can instantly apply new formatting throughout your entire website without needing to make the changes manually on a page-by-page basis.

If you use the BestAddress HTML Editor to build your website, tutorial chapters on how to create style sheets are available from the 'Help' menu by choosing the Tutorials option.

Create templates

Templates make it easier to add new pages to your site. Templates might be as simple as a read-only webpage file that doesn't contain any text. They can also be a dedicated template file such as the CTP template format used exclusively by the BestAddress HTML Editor, which can even store related files within the template to make it easier to collaborate with others.

Take regular breaks

Allocate time to take regular breaks away from your work, and make sure that you stick with the break schedule. Even if you might at first feel that you are "wasting time", in reality, regular breaks will result in you being more productive than if you would work non-stop.

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