Handy How-to Tips for Building a Christmas Website

With Christmas time coming up, what better time to share your favorites of the Christmas season and maybe sell a product or two via your own personal Christmas webpage? Here's some helpful tips to get you on your way to making your own Christmas webpage.

Decide on Your Christmas Website Content

Christmas time offers the chance to share your favorite food, music, decorations, activities, gifts, events, prayers, poems, stories and more. Do a search on Christmas websites to determine the competition in the areas your Christmas website will cover. Then decide what you have new to offer or where you will specialize and why people will want to come to your website.

Build Your Search Engine Optimized Christmas Website Copy

Website copy is the explanation of what your website offers. It can include poems, wishes to friends, and soft core sales pitch about why your products have more to offer than anyone else. If you are sharing recipes, explain what recipes you will offer. If you provide a full set of offerings, be sure to offer links to additional pages and make sure all of your links have a forward and backward links.

Create a Personal Christmas Website Brand Look

Decide the colors and style your Christmas website will showcase. Thematic Christmas backgrounds, music and photographs will help set the tone for your offerings and help to establish the website brand.

Select Photos for Your Christmas Website

The photos you choose to use on your website can help set the website brand. Make sure to reduce the number of pixels in your photographs to ensure a quick load onto the page, don't ask your customers to wait forever to have it load. Using a slide show link to Flicker can allow you to share more photos with less page load time.

Select Music for Your Christmas Website

Choose Christmas music from to play on your webpage. Music starting automatically when it loads can be slow. Pick another place to have music begin such as mousing over a menu item or when someone clicks on song of the day..

Choose Your Christmas Website Development Tool

If you're new to website development, you may choose to create a blog from Wordpress, Blogger, Squidoo or other site since most have the ability to offer the same content as a webpage. Then customize your blog with appropriate colors. An original background photograph can help set your brand look. Squidoo has the advantage of being free, will pay for advertisement hits, and offers a number of free tool enclosures that allows you to have much more content that changes often.

If you want to delve into webpage development, most of the companies that offer a domain allow you to set up your webpage for free using their in house development tools. This is one step more complicated than using a blog, but can offer different styles and layouts plus easier access to shopping cart tools.

Using one of the development suites can offer additional complexity in the number of linked pages and help you manage the overall project by ensuring that web page links are maintained and up to date. They can also ease copying the files associated with your webpage from your personal PC up to the webpage server.

Setting Up Your Christmas Website Domain Name

You can buy your own website domain name from places like Godaddy.com or Yahoo.com. Having a domain name provides your website an easy to remember name that people can search for and find. Once you have your domain name, www.ChristmasWebsiteXYZ.com, you follow the directions to establish the link. Many times you have to wait a day or so before it is live.

Submit Your Christmas Website to the Search Engines

Depending on the website tool, you are provided help to submit your website to the search engines at many levels. On Yahoo, they will submit your website to some of the top search engines like Yahoo and Google for no additional cost. On Godaddy.com, they sell the use of a tool called TrafficBlazer that helps guide you through setting up your keywords on your webpage and submitting it to the search engines.

Link to Other Christmas Websites

I started a Squidoo Lens when I was first learning, click here to view a work in progress. Please share links to your webpage if you comment, I'm happy to add new friends, and learn from others.