Step 5 - Plan the Site

There are many prebuilt website functionality available which can enhance your website. You will most likely need to install some scripts on the server, the most common being a form script. Scripts are also available for functionality like guestbook, blogs, forums chat, poll, etc.

This is a good time to install any required scripts as you will need to link them from your web pages. Customize the interface of the scripts as much as possible to blend well with the look and feel of the rest of the website. In the case of a form you will probably need to create a form html page with the required fields and integrate it with the form script. Test it thoroughly to ensure it works fine and that you are getting the emails sent from the site.

In case you are not comfortable installing scripts there are free service providers that offer all these and more hosted on their server, but which you can easily customize and include into your website by adding the some code that they provide into your website's html pages. Some essential functionality you will need include forms and site search.

In some cases your entire site can be built on an installed script like Joomla CMS or Wordpress blog. Drupal and Mambo are are other content management systems. All these can be easily installed via Fantastico which comes with some hosting servers e.g. Hostgator Fantastico also allows you to easily install certain forum, photo gallery, shopping cart, CMS, LMS and customer relationship management software etc. If you have a WordPress blog site you might want to install plugins to enhance your blog. Joomla templates, Drupal themes,Mambo templates and Wordpress themes are also available.

If you require ecommerce functionality you could build your site on Yahoo! Small Business or install an open source ecommerce engine via Fantastico. Various ecommerce templates/ themes are available to help you customize the look of the ecommerce engine of your choice.

If you need a discussion board or forum you can install PhpBB via Fantastico. PhpBB skins are available so that the look of the forum can be customized.

If you need a portal site you could install php-Nuke via Fantastico. php-Nuke Themes are also available.

Here's a list of the web applications that Fantastico can install with the click of a mouse:

WebCalendar

I highly recommend Hostgator as I use it to host this website. They provide Fantastico with their Linux hosting, a great free Site Builder and various other features. They also have a plan that allows you to host multiple domains.

There are also some all-in-one website building solutions which may have all you need already installed and ready to use.