Design Your Own Website – A User Friendly How To Guide Aimed At Would-be Designers
To design your own website will not only save you a lot of money, but it can also be a very rewarding experience. There is, after all, nobody else that knows the subject of your website better than yourself. Who better then to design a website for your business, your family, your hobby or your club or organization than you?
If you are reasonably intelligent (and by reading this far your must be!) and you have access to a computer, you could get all the knowledge and software you need for free. All you need to bring to the table is the willingness to learn.
One of your very first decisions will be whether you want to register a domain name for your website (like microsoft.com) or whether you are going to use a free host and use the long website address that is normally involved with such an option. If the website will be for your business you should not give the free host option much thought. A business needs its own domain name for many reasons, not least of which is brand building.
Even if the website will only be for an organization or club it is still better to have its own domain name. The only circumstance where you could go for the free hosting/long URL option is when you will simply use the website to upload pictures of your recent holiday or for other private purposes.
Your second step will be to download a free WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) website editor. There are numerous good free editors available. There are open source packages that will do just about anything you will need for your first website. Make sure the one you choose to download can handle tables, style sheets and forms. Read what other people say about it – you don’t want an editor that creates such garbled code that it can never be edited by anybody else again.
Most good WYSIWYG editors work in much the same way as the better known word processing packages. You can type, format text, insert pictures and tables and create forms at the click of a button. Don’t be scared to experiment. Play around with colors and graphics a bit.
Do some research on what makes for good page layout. Especially if this will be a business website, it is important where you place things on the page. It is also important which colors you use on which type of background. On a business website don’t use large fonts and exclamation marks a lot – it looks unprofessional.
Something else that is important is to get your meta tags right. These are hidden tags that your website visitors won’t see, but search engines and directories use it to put your website in the correct category. The title, keyword and description tags can be inserted without any programming knowledge in most visual website editors.
An important decision is where you will be hosting the website. There are certainly huge number of free web hosts available. The bulk of them will display some form of advertisement on your pages, so for a professional website this is not recommended. Web hosting has become relatively cheap over the past decade, so rather find a reliable cheap web host.
Then download a free FTP program (there are many) from the Internet and use it to upload your files to the web server of your hosting company.
The mere fact that you were able to design your own website will boost your confidence and if you found it interesting it could even turn into a new career or part-time income.
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Tags: business, internet, money designing websites, New Career, technology, webmaster, Webmaster Tools, website design, websites
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