A friend of mine sent me this video with the Speech that Steve Jobs did at Stanford in 2005. Even it past two years, the message inside is very actual and represent an important lesson for every entrepreneur.

One of the programs I mostly use to program web pages is Dreamweaver. This is a terrific tool fordoing this job and is part of Macromedia (now Adobe) suite. The program itself it’s perhaps a expensive if your budget is low. In this case, I recommend you NVU, another great.

NVU is a complete Web Authoring System for Linux desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu (which stands for “new view”) makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.

NVU includes an FTP administrator in order to publish online your works; It also comes with a WYSIWYG editor and helps you validating the code while you write it down.

The other good reason for choosing NVU is because is Open Source. Go ahead, test it!.

If you really want to have success when creating your website, I recommend not making the following common mistakes:

1. Don’t have a main focus or objective
Many times, I get into a website and I don’t understand the site objective. It has not a common subject and it’s hard to understand what the site offers. Content? Products? Services? I once visited a website that sells perfumes and also offers soccer tickets. What for? Which was their relationship? Who knows… For me, it was a waste content. Even if your site is not ecommerce oriented, it’s very important to define the main objective of it, so every piece of content that you add will follow this goal.

2. Flash Made
I really like Flash and the things you can do with this wonderful application. Lot of great animations and creative designs can be created with Flash; however, not all internet connections are via CABLE / DSL, especially in not developed markets. Heavy Flash sites could be a problem when the visitor’s connection is not so fast and could invite your visitors to exit the site. In other hand, search engines could not successfully index flash content, so the site will become invisible for this great traffic sources. So, pay attention if you decide to go live with a website created 100% in Flash.

3. Give too many options for the site visitors
If your site has a main objective, you can simple guide your visitors to it. For instance, if your site objective is selling toys, it’s correct to generate content related to it, showing a toys catalogue, adding recommendations based on children age, instructions for play games, and many other contents that follows the same objective: sell toys. But, if the site content is not well organized, your visitors could become frustrated trying to follow your site links. So, pay attention in your site objective, focusing in how you organized your site content. A good strategy is show al the information in no more that three clicks.

4. No Follow Up
Many times I talked with clients that invested lot of time and money preparing their online business, and then, going online following their master plans. But, in many occasions, those people didn’t follow up the site’s meters. Maybe because their business became a complete success; maybe because they don’t. Follow up a website requires to control their site traffic, studying what your visitor did while they get into the web pages, knowing their preferences and the most popular information, as any other important information that help you take decisions about your business.

5. Very heavy pages
I already write about websites created 100% in Flash; another problem represent those websites that each page last to many time for loading; perhaps because their images; perhaps because the hosting service; the result is also an invitation to your visitor to exit your page. I recommend you to frequently check the average time that your page loads.

6. Rely on a static website
If your visitors found the same page each time they enter to your site, you have many chances to loose them as frequent users. You should renew your content in order to renew your website. Those websites that don’t add new content frequently are mainly classified as static pages; others are dynamic pages. A page with dynamic content invites the visitors to return more frequently and so helps your website to obtain more traffic and profits.

7. Don’t think on an easy way to manage your content
Once you go live with your webpage you’ll probably face the problem of how to update from now on, their content. You pay for a designer or programmer and they put your website online, but didn’t think an easy way for create or modify the site contents. That’s a common mistake that happen lot of time. Don’t having a content administrator will force you to ask again your designers and programmers to do this job for you, and results in lot of money spent for this simple task.