Design Your Own Website – A User Friendly How To Guide To Help Novices
A lot of people out there think that to design your own website you need a PhD in computer science. This is simply not true, although those of us who are web designers would like you to think that. The truth is that you know your business, your hobby or your family better than anybody else, so you should actually be the one doing the website!
Many people think you need to be a rocket scientist to build a website. The truth is that any reasonably intelligent person with access to a couple of good reference sources and the right software can design a decent, functional website in a relatively short time.
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.
The same goes if the website is for a club or organization. A professional image will never do any harm in this regard. Only if the website will be solely for your family photos or pictures of your pets should you entertain the thought of using a free subdomain offered by your ISP or another company.
Your next step will be to find a decent visual (WYSIWIG) web editor. A quick search on your favorite search engine will reveal numerous options. Many professional software packages have a free option – they hope you will later upgrade to the paid version. There are also open source packages available that will always remain free. Most of them can do all the basics: style sheets, forms, tables, inserting pictures etc.
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.
Another important aspect is adding the right meta tags. These tags can’t seen by your website visitors, but the search directories (such as Yahoo) and search engines (e. G. Google) use them to decide where and in which category to list your website. You can insert title tags, description tags and keywords easily with most visual editors without knowing any code.
Finally you will have to find a place to host your website. There are numerous free hosting companies. Most of them will display banner ads on your pages, so unless this is a private website it’s not very useful. Rather visit one of the website hosting directories and find a highly recommended cheap web host.
Then get yourself a good free FTP program from the web. Just do a quick Google search – there are many of them. You need this to upload your files to the Internet.
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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