How to Design My Own Website

Just a quick word out to you all.

I have been busy with website projects (fancy that) but I still plan to be back here soon with more interesting things. I think the most difficult is trying to figure out where to start. There is so much to talk about and so many different levels (I am guessing) of people coming in here. I almost want to just start from scratch and then go from there.

So with that said, what I hope to come back to soon -the basic steps of designing your own website. For now I am going to take a generic approach because there are so many reasons people are designing a website.

It can really be divided into two categories
1) Personal
2) Business

(And of course there’s quite a bit of overlap)

Personal I will say is generally a person, couple, or group writing about themselves, their life, or their experience.

Business I will say is generally a business (fancy that) wanting to sell a product or rather fulfill a need.

Personal can take many forms from a blog (like this), to a forum, to some other interactive site.

Business can also be a forum, interactive site, providing of services, providing of products, etc.

The design you take for each of those sites will vary greatly, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say most of the people coming here are for personal sites OR small online business sites which may overlap quite a bit with personal sites.

So what is the next thing?

1) Figure out the purpose of your site
2) Figure out how you would like to accomplish that
3) Go to other sites you like that may do something similar and get ideas for colors and designs
4) Pick a domain name (VERY IMPORTANT) and register it
5) Get a hosting company. With few exceptions I always recommend a paid hosting company. Free hosting or free blogging sites have their place, but in general hosting is so cheap these days ($5 a month!) that if you really are dedicating time to this, I’d say pony up the money – not only will you get a better product but in your mind you will be that much more committed (very important!!)

From there, you can go two ways
1) Design your site from scratch
2) Modify someone else’s site to be your site

I prefer the second – I don’t want to build my own car. I want to buy a new one (or even used one) and then customize and modify it for me (better wheels, nice stereo, and fuzzy dice!). This means you will have a combination of two things to look at

Fortunately there are so many ways to go about this. You can easily find many templates out there (I’ll point you to some when I go into more detail about this). At the same time you can build up some paintshop or photoshop skills to help with graphic design. You can also learn HTML, CSS, etc. to work on look and feel.

Okay, that’s the general direction. I’ll go into more detail on those steps in the next few weeks. Until then!