For me building a professional looking website that earns revenue is a little like drawing pictures of cartoons. I break the big picture down into smaller parts and focus on getting those right. Once finished with these smaller steps, I then take a step back and look at the site I have made. The following is a list of smaller steps that I take when creating websites that I would like to share with you. These help me to build more professional looking websites that people will come back to.

Picking a Domain Name

Domain names are names made up of any word or combination of words and or numbers you may want. Examples of Domain names are for instance, Amazon.com, DotDeb.com. Other types of names you may see are usually assigned to a web site owner by the site hosts, for instance, “Wakoo.xzjamie.1576_chronicles.com”, which isn't very catchy.

One way to boost the traffic to your site and make it look more professional is to end it with a .com, .org, or other suitable ending. These names are best kept short, easy to spell and memorable. This makes it easy for a person to find your site again.

Picking a Website Host

When choosing a company to host your site, you want to make sure they support a way for you to easily make the type of site you want. If you can program in a language, for instance, JavaScript, php, peryl, python, make sure the host states on their site that they support that language before committing your time and money. Optionally you can install Nucleus or find out if they offer a sitebuilder of their own.

Getting Page Rank

Page Rank or PR is a concept mainly associated with Google. Page rank is a measurement of how likely a link to your site is to be clicked. The more likely someone is to click on your site, the higher the page rank Google assigns it. Page rank is measured on a scale of 1 to 10. The higher the number, the more likely someone is to click a link to your site. It is important to have the highest page rank you can get, because the higher the PR, the higher in Google’s search results, your site will appear. A page rank of zero for instance would probably not even appear on the first page of Google’s search results. So the higher your site's page rank, the more people will see your site and click on it in Google's search results. This translates into more visitors and more purchases from your site, or more potential clicks on the advertisements you display.

A common way of increasing your page rank is by posting in forums and making sure that your website’s address is somewhere in your post. Also you can Post on blogs, write articles and submit them to article submission sites. This takes time, but if you are the kind of person who spends a lot of time in forums or blogs anyway, then for you it will be much easier. Once, people know that your site exists, some of them will also begin making posts about your site, further increasing your page rank.

Site Revenue

It’s nice to do things for free, but in the end it’s very hard to keep up with, unless it’s also making you a living. Extra money also gives you that extra incentive to make the site better than you normally would. Generating revenue from your site can come in many forms. Some of these including selling items, adding banner ads, pop under ads, and affiliate programs. See Generating Revenue for a more in depth look at this topic.

See Also
Making a Professional Website
Finding a Webhost
Hosting Downloadable Content
Making Money with your Site