Designing websites successfully takes practice and patience, but with the right motivation, anyone can learn to be good at it. There's a distinctive process to designing a website, a number of hard-and-fast rules to follow, and you'll need to know web programming languages. The most encouraging thing, however, is that there are a lot of tools at your disposal these days, and most of the best ones are free.
The Site Plan
Before you touch a computer, make sure you know the answers to some of the big questions: What's the point of this website? Who's the audience? Then, write out a site plan: Note down everything you want your site to contain, then organize all those things into a structure: for example, you might have a "news" section, which might have an "entertainment news" subsection.
The rule of thumb is to never have more than seven choices at a time: aim for seven or less main sections, give each of those sections seven or less subsections and so on. Also decide how many layouts your site will need. Most sites have a main template they use for articles but a different template for the homepage.
Preparing Your Workspace
To have a safe space to design and test your site, you'll need to set up a private home server before you buy a domain name and a commercial hosting plan. You can do this for free with the software suite XAMPP. You'll also need a better text editor than Notepad or TextEdit: free programs like Aptana and Notepad++ color-code your code to make it easier to manage.
Finally, you need to know web programming languages. You don't necessarily need to fully understand PHP and SQL, but you should at least be comfortable with HTML and CSS. Check out the tutorials at W3 Schools.
Structuring Your Site
A content management system is a program you install on your site's server that provides a clean user interface for creating new sections, writing new articles, and organizing layouts. It's a must-have for most websites because it does an enormous amount of the legwork and technical stuff for you. There are many free CMSs, and they all approach websites in slightly different ways: WordPress is optimized for blogging, for example, while Joomla! works well for large company sites. For beginners, try CMS Made Simple.
Each CMS has a set of pre-existing design templates (or "layouts" or "themes") at your disposal. You have three choices: revise your own layout plans to fit a pre-existing template, choose a template to use as a "base" and then alter it to fit your own style, or create a template of your own. When you're just starting, option two is probably your best bet as it'll give you an idea of how the templates are organized.
Design Tips
The most important advice is to keep things simple: make sure your website's navigation system is clear, your text is readable, your graphics aren't obnoxious, and every page is linked to from somewhere else. Clarity is more important than anything else.
Styling text is an important but oft-overlooked step for beginning web designers. In the CSS file, if you increase the "line-height" attribute and make the text dark gray instead of black, you'll discover that words have suddenly become more pleasant to read. Another reliable tip is to make the font of your articles a sans-serif font (such as Arial or Verdana) and the headings of your articles a serif font (fonts with little lines on the ends of their letters, such as Times New Roman or Georgia).
For graphics, backgrounds and borders, use lots of shades of the same color. Instead of a solid blue background, for example, create a gradient between a dark shade of blue and a slightly darker shade of blue (using an image editor like Photoshop or Gimp); this can give sites a subtle professional sheen. Likewise, if you had a blue box on your site with a background color code of #222299, for example, don't make the border black. Make it something only slightly darker, like #111188.
Finally, take cues from your audience. A site for a large corporation is likely not going to have lots of pinks and neon yellows, but a modern art site might. And while a programming blog might get away with a really small font, an entertainment site for teenagers will need something that's readable even when you lean way back in your chair. Use common sense and you'll be well on your way.
Article Resource: Tips on How to Design Websites | ehow.com
The Site Plan
Before you touch a computer, make sure you know the answers to some of the big questions: What's the point of this website? Who's the audience? Then, write out a site plan: Note down everything you want your site to contain, then organize all those things into a structure: for example, you might have a "news" section, which might have an "entertainment news" subsection.
The rule of thumb is to never have more than seven choices at a time: aim for seven or less main sections, give each of those sections seven or less subsections and so on. Also decide how many layouts your site will need. Most sites have a main template they use for articles but a different template for the homepage.
Preparing Your Workspace
To have a safe space to design and test your site, you'll need to set up a private home server before you buy a domain name and a commercial hosting plan. You can do this for free with the software suite XAMPP. You'll also need a better text editor than Notepad or TextEdit: free programs like Aptana and Notepad++ color-code your code to make it easier to manage.
Finally, you need to know web programming languages. You don't necessarily need to fully understand PHP and SQL, but you should at least be comfortable with HTML and CSS. Check out the tutorials at W3 Schools.
Structuring Your Site
A content management system is a program you install on your site's server that provides a clean user interface for creating new sections, writing new articles, and organizing layouts. It's a must-have for most websites because it does an enormous amount of the legwork and technical stuff for you. There are many free CMSs, and they all approach websites in slightly different ways: WordPress is optimized for blogging, for example, while Joomla! works well for large company sites. For beginners, try CMS Made Simple.
Each CMS has a set of pre-existing design templates (or "layouts" or "themes") at your disposal. You have three choices: revise your own layout plans to fit a pre-existing template, choose a template to use as a "base" and then alter it to fit your own style, or create a template of your own. When you're just starting, option two is probably your best bet as it'll give you an idea of how the templates are organized.
Design Tips
The most important advice is to keep things simple: make sure your website's navigation system is clear, your text is readable, your graphics aren't obnoxious, and every page is linked to from somewhere else. Clarity is more important than anything else.
Styling text is an important but oft-overlooked step for beginning web designers. In the CSS file, if you increase the "line-height" attribute and make the text dark gray instead of black, you'll discover that words have suddenly become more pleasant to read. Another reliable tip is to make the font of your articles a sans-serif font (such as Arial or Verdana) and the headings of your articles a serif font (fonts with little lines on the ends of their letters, such as Times New Roman or Georgia).
For graphics, backgrounds and borders, use lots of shades of the same color. Instead of a solid blue background, for example, create a gradient between a dark shade of blue and a slightly darker shade of blue (using an image editor like Photoshop or Gimp); this can give sites a subtle professional sheen. Likewise, if you had a blue box on your site with a background color code of #222299, for example, don't make the border black. Make it something only slightly darker, like #111188.
Finally, take cues from your audience. A site for a large corporation is likely not going to have lots of pinks and neon yellows, but a modern art site might. And while a programming blog might get away with a really small font, an entertainment site for teenagers will need something that's readable even when you lean way back in your chair. Use common sense and you'll be well on your way.
Article Resource: Tips on How to Design Websites | ehow.com
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