You are in the midst of creating a new business, and you realize you need a website to attract customers. In today’s world, where websites are the finest places to learn about businesses and acquire their services, a firm without a functional website will not have much appeal.
A notepad application and a grasp of HTML are all that is required to create a website. If you build a simple website in notepad and save it as.html, you can access it in a web browser and it will appear correctly.
HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language, and it is a programming language for identifying the various structures and components of web pages. All web browsers are able to parse HTML from the text commands incorporated into the various webpages.
One of the various marketing channels you may use to engage with your target audience, cement your brand positioning, develop your client base, and generate revenue is online marketing. Your website is the hub of your digital marketing plan, which, when executed properly, will benefit your company. There are numerous crucial aspects to keep in mind as you embark on this exciting and gratifying “how to design your own website” journey.
What is the purpose of your website?
What are your goals for your website? Do you require an e-commerce site that can accept orders and handle payments? Or do you intend to merely publish articles or opinion pieces and make them available to the general audience online? Many people make the mistake of constructing a website without first determining its purpose, especially if they’re doing it alone.
1. Coding the Website
When using HTML to create a website, you must ensure that everything is properly formatted. This is all done with HTML code, and if the various sections of a website aren’t included, the page won’t look the way you want it to, or worse, will generate error messages.
For example, on a website that exclusively utilises HTML, the initial line of code should always be html> and the last line of code should always be /html>. You can have as many HTML tags and commands as you want between those two tags.
Almost every website will have a head> tag for the heading, a body> tag for the site’s body, h1> tags for the top heading title, sub-headings, p> for paragraphs, and so on.
Keep in mind that each tag must have a closing tag, which is essentially the same tag with a / in front of it.
After you’ve completed building your website, the HTML document will appear to most people as a bewildering mess of text. Your website will be shown after that file is loaded onto a web server and accessible by a browser.
Once again, the time it takes to code a website in HTML is determined on its size and complexity. A simple website can be built in an hour or less. On the other hand, most normal sites will take many days to complete.
2. Determine Your Website’s Goals
The foremost thing you would do while designing a website is to determine your website goals. You are required to understand what exactly you want your site to accomplish.
To analyze your site goals, you need to begin answering some basic questions, which include-
- What shall be the primary function of your website?
- What is your specific target audience?
- What do you want your site to achieve for the business?
When your mind is equipped with simple answers, it will be easy to answer all these questions. Moreover, it will help you better understand how framing your website in a particular way will help you achieve your goals. If you plan to create a content-heavy site that aims to familiarize users, you need a perfect plan. You can plan to create a more extensive website that accomplishes both of these things.
3. Choose A CMS (HTML)
You need to know the specific goals of your website since it will help you create the most efficient one. Many first-time site builders prefer a content management system that works as a platform that assists in building websites.
Some of the most popular CMS platforms are WordPress, Wix, Weebly, WooCommerce, and many more.
If you prefer to use any of these platforms, you will surely be able to build a website that remains visible and works efficiently for you and others.
In other words, you can visually design your website. If you carry a vast knowledge of HTML, you can build a website from scratch instead of using CMS. Therefore, HTML remains more challenging and gives you more creative freedom. If you want to create a from-scratch HTML site, but you don’t have the expertise to do it, you can hire a web design agency to build one for yourself.
4. Plan Your Website Layout & Strategize Branding
One of the essential needs is to plan a practical layout of your website to get perfect branding.
Moreover, if you are planning on how your website will be organized. Then, it would be best if you began to think with questions such as-
How many sections will be there on your website?
How many pages will be included in each section?
How will the sections be organized?
It works as an essential step because, apart from improving your workflow, it also helps you determine the layout of your site’s navigation.
When users visit your website, they will be able to access each detail of your business.
At the same time, it will help increase the number of viewers and optimize your business on the search engine.
After you plan your site’s overall layout, create wireframes for each page of your website to determine how page elements will be laid down.
You need to ensure how to plan your branding strategy and how you want your website to communicate with your unique brand.
You will be able to choose your color schemes, font, and language style to ensure your website carries a consistent and branded look.
5. Register A Domain Name & Find A Web Host
You need to set up your domain name and web hosting before you begin to design your actual pages. This is because a domain name is the site’s address which includes its base URL, whereas web hosting refers to physical servers where the site gets stored.
You can also think of using the websites such as GoDaddy.com to search for available domain names.
You need to ensure that your chosen domain name remains short, easy to remember, and gets linked with the identity of your business.
For example, if your company is ABC Electronics, the perfect domain name would be abcelectronics.com.
After you purchase a domain, you can set up your web hosting on the same site, especially once you bought your domain names such as GoDaddy, Bluehost, and many more web hosting sites.
6. Create Website Pages & Ideate Content
You need to set up the website pages and keep them organized as they need to be in the initial layout and think of including a navigation bar at the top of the site that allows users to move around quickly.
You also need to ideate perfect content strategies for your business. You can also plan to produce videos that you want to use, create images, and write all textual content mentioned in blog posts and service pages. You need to ensure that your user information remains informative and helpful to users.
7. Optimize Your Site For SEO
After letting your essential website get set up, you can think of optimizing it for search engine optimization. SEO remains a marketing strategy involving getting your website to rank high in relevant search results, so users can easily find it.
There are many SEO optimization strategies that you can use, and they include-
8. Page Speed Optimization
You should think of getting page speed as fast as possible. You can easily do this by caching web pages, compressing images, and minifying code.
9. Responsive Design
It is necessary to have a mobile-friendly website that will allow you to retain traffic on mobile devices and help you to rank higher on Google. In addition, you must use responsive web design services, which will automatically help restructure your pages to fit into any screen where they appear.
10. HTTPS
Your site needs to be secure for users. This is why you need to ensure that your website uses HTTPS for your website. It will help in boosting your Google rankings.
So, if you think of following each of the above strategies, your site will attract more traffic once it gets launched.
11. Re-Optimize Your Website
By creating a perfect website setup, you can move to build the final step of building a website. When your website goes live, you need to track user behavior on your website, which will drive traffic. So, it would help if you searched for different ways to re optimize your site to perform better. It will help increase your search rankings and bring more traffic to produce more conversions.
Conclusion
It can be concluded that website design is effective, especially when it ensures the website attains its purpose. For an assumption, the web design should work to make the content delivery better and make it more enjoyable for readers. Every website needs different elements to make the design more effective. You need to ensure that you organize pages logically and help the user find the correct information. Lastly, you need to ensure that fonts, colors, and layout should make the content look more appealing.
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