Web Design – Layman’s Guide to Web Designing

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Web Design – Layman’s Guide to Web Designing

27 July 2009 3 Comments

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Web design has become less complicated than what it used to be a few years ago. With changes in web design industry and technological advancements, designing websites has become a relatively simple process. There is an abundance of web design software and web authoring tools available in the market today. State of the art web design authoring tools such as Dreamweaver and Go Live have made designing a website a far less technical experience than what it used to be in the early stages of web design.

The days of hand coding a website from scratch are gone. Web designers today use WSYWIG (what you see is what you get) software packages that provide a drag and drop approach to designing a website. Nevertheless, the design of a professional and commercially successful website requires careful thought and planning. A professional website needs to address a combination of issues in order to achieve its objectives and prove a valuable asset for a business.
There are many crucial steps to designing a successful website for your company. The steps are listed below and explained briefly at the end.

•    Define the objectives for designing the company’s website. Identify what you hope to achieve.
•    What are the unique features that your website should offer?
•    Define the structure of the website and identify what sections the website should have.
•    Prepare and finalise the content for the website
•    Select an appropriate design style for your website
•    Develop the website
•    Evaluate and review the website and make the desired amendments
•    Launch the website on a suitable web hosting platform.

Identify the Objectives of the website:

We have discussed above that careful planning is essential to develop a successful website. This is one of the first steps that that will decide the success or failure of the site. It is important to understand the main purpose of the website and the objectives it hopes to achieve. How the website is built, the functionality it offers and how you evaluate its performance will depend on what you expect to achieve form your website. It is important to conceptualise an idea for your website and focus on its purpose. Many issues need to be considered during the planning stage. The website should be designed with the needs of the market in mind. You should list down the main focus and objectives and this can have an impact on different stages of the project.

Features of the Website:

The features offered by your website should be identified at the start of the project. This has an impact on the design and build of the site so it is best identified and finalised at the start, as far as possible. Changes to the requirement at a later stage can have an impact on time and resulting cost of developing the website. You need to consider the specific features your website will offer e.g. whether it will be an informational website or will it have a shopping cart feature and accept payments on-line. You can also decide whether your website has a password protection section for customers or are all sections open to the general publics. You also need to decide what data will you capture from customers as you website can be an important source for collecting marketing information from potential customers.

Define the structure of the website:

The structure of the website is important. The structure decides how content is presented on the website to customers. The different sections of the website should be carefully selected as it provides the opportunity to group information together as independent pages of the website. All sections of the website will then be made accessible via a menu or navigation system on the website. If the structure is complex, it is advised to draw a diagram can easily show you the hierarchy order of the individual web pages and the relation between the pages or sections.

Prepare and finalise the content:

Content on the website is becoming increasingly important. Content on the different pages of the website is an important factor in determining the eventual success of the website. The content o n the website is one it’s most valuable assets and plays an important role in deciding whether users visit the website again in future. The content should be carefully researched and well prepared. It should be add value for the user and should be proof read and error free.

Select an appropriate design style:

There are many different types of design styles used when designing websites. A website can be bright and colourful or it can have toned down colours. Different styles may suit different purposes and circumstances. Similarly the layout and style is also influenced by other factors such as the market you are targeting, the nature of your business and so on. The overall design style and theme should be based on the needs of your intended market. The visual presentation of the website is important and the overall website should reflect a professional, clean-cut feel.

Develop the website:

When you have finished planning, listed the main features and selected a design style for your website, it is time to start building the site. Whether you are designing the website yourself or hiring an experienced web design company for the task, it is important to have a good understanding of the requirements and specification of the proposed website. If you are hiring an external web design team, it is important to convey the objectives, provide input and be involved in the process from the start. This is the stage wherein you need to finally start building the website.

Evaluate the website:

Once the website has been designed, you can review and test the site in detail. You should review and evaluate not only the design and functionality but also the content on different section s of the website. Changes and amendments should be made accordingly and the site should be reviewed again.

Launch of the website:

The final step is to register a domain name if you have not already done so and find a suitable web hosting platform for hosting the website. There are many we hosting companies who offer competitive process on a wide range of features. It is advisable to host the website on a business web hosting account as it offers sufficient bandwidth and server resources to run the site smoothly at all time with minimal downtime. Cheaper web hosting services can offer poor quality and increased down time.

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3 Comments »

Web design seo development services providers India said:

A good amount of business can be lost if the website is not well designed and even a well designed website wont be able to serve the purpose, if it does not hold a good search rank. Web SEO Development companies in India provide 360 degree solution in web designing SEO optimization.

# 29 July 2009 at 8:04 am

web application development said:

It is advisable to frequently update your site. When visitors come to your website, they are looking for updated information on your content.

# 30 July 2009 at 8:01 am

Web Site Hosting New Mexico said:

Web Designing is an art and it consists of lines, shapes, textures, colors etc., into pleasing arrangements, so it is an art of creating a single web page or a whole web site. Graphic, animation formations, color selection, font selection direction-finding design, content creation are some of the aspects that can be included in web production or web design. In general a web site consists of text and images. Very first page of any web site is recognized as the home page or index page. Every web page inside a website has an HTML file. After creating every web page; they are usually linked together by means of a direction-finding menu composed of hyper links.

# 30 July 2009 at 8:12 am