Tips On Designing Your Website
The first thing to consider before you start to design your website is “the purpose of your website”. What is the objective of your website?
Is your website going to be a single page to capture leads?
Is your website for marketing your company, your products and service?
Is the purpose of your website to provide information or act as a forum, blog or community?
Sit down with some paper and a pen and start writing down a list of what the purpose of you is. You need to have the purpose of your website written down clearly before you can start designing it.
If you don’t have a clear written down purpose of you website, the site that you design will start to look like a mess. You may have to start all over again. Writing down the purpose of your website will save you time and money.
Once you have written down the purpose of your website, start thinking about how it is going to look like. Use Google to search for similar websites and get a feel of how they are structured.
The most important goal of your website is to get your message out clearly and fulfil the purpose of why you have created it.
It is important to consider how visitors on your website are going to navigate it. Your website navigation menu should be clear and easy to use. Take some time to plan it out on paper. Visitors to your website will need to know where they are at after clicking on any navigation links, they need to know how to get back and progress to the next section.
The information you place in your website has to be clearly laid out in short sentences. This will ensure that visitors to your website are encouraged to read the content.
You can either design your own website or have it designed by someone else. There are pros and cons attached to both routes.
If you are considering to design your own website, you will need to know how to create the layout and content and publish it to the space provided by your web host.
It is a good idea to learn the basics of website design and management like: html, ftp, setting up email accounts, databases…
You can use website designing packages like Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft Frontpage…
You may also need to create graphics for your website. One of the leading packages that you can use for this is Adobe Photoshop.
You can also purchase website design templates and graphics online.
If you intend to use your site to just provide information and links, you can use the free blogging software WordPress and customize it using themes and plugins.
If you are planning on creating a forum, there are various free and premium scripts available. One of the most popular forum software is vBulletin.
You can also buy ready made scripts to create a wide range of websites that cater to different needs. You can modify these scripts to suit your own requirements.
If you are able to design your own website, you will have greater control over how it looks and functions.
Make sure that your website is cross browser compatible, you want your site to be accessible to as many people as possible.
If you don’t have the required skills, knowledge or the time to design your own website, you can’t get it created by a web designer.
There are a large number of companies offering website design services along with their main business. Most of these companies offer simple html sites with basic database connectivity.
There are some companies that specialise in web design and web programming; they are able to create more complex websites. These companies are a good option if you have the necessary budget.
If you are on a low budget, you can hire freelancers to design your website. You can get a quote for designing your site by placing your requirements on ScriptLance or Elance.
By posting your requirements, they will be viewed by web site designers from around the world. They will place their bid of how much money they will charge to create your website. You can choose the best bid by looking at the price quoted and the skill set of the programmer or company.
Copyright 2009 Mujibur Rahman. All rights reserved worldwide.
