Design Your Website: Step-by-Step Tutorial
You are going to learn in this tutorial how to design your website. Even if you don't have the basicknowledge of web design, you will be taught in this tutorial step by step on how to set up a functional site. In the tutorial, I would entertain any assumption about your knowledge of website and internet except that you can surf the internet since you are already on this page.
Preparing To Design Your Website
As with many human projects, usually the first step should be to embark on a thorough research. If you have taken the offer to build for somebody, you would research to understand and develop an outline or format for the website and then to be able to design the website. Variables that may affect the deliver-ability of your service to your clients such as the target audience, goals and objectives etc., should be asked for early enough. You may even do some market research before and after information gathering from the clients. The extent the research will go will be determined by your experience in the industry and the client's budget.
Brainstorm, put ideas together after you have had good grasp of the project and there you go!. Rather than looking for the perfect idea to be your first, throw out any and all ideas or concepts for the website as a start. A few websites might require a routine web interface, with navigation and content areas to be where most users expect them to be. Others might call for entirely unique concepts and ideas in their built. Really, what should should determine the design and the approach to designing should be the content of the website. A blog site would entail a different approach from an ecommerce site in design and approach.
Get Your Domain Name
To design your website, first thing you need to do before anything else is to get yourself a domain name. Domain name is the name you will give to the site. For instance, it might look like this, "example.com", where example could be anything. You have to subscribe annually or so for the right to use the name. Just obtaining a name would not get you website. it's just a name. It's sort of like registering a business name in the brick-and-mortar world; having that business name does not mean that you also have the shop premises to go with it.
Detailed information on getting a good domain name can be found in the article Tips on Choosing a Good Domain Name.
You may also want to read Top Ten Blogging Platforms
Choosing and Signing up With a Web-hosting Company.
A web host is basically a company that has many computers connected to the Internet. In that case, when you place your posts on their computers, the information can be disseminated world wide via the use of internet. You will need to sign up for an account with a web host so that your website has a home.
You can find different web hosting companies here.
The next step is to host your domain on your account on your web hosting company. Information on how to do this can be found in the guide How to Point a Domain Name to Your Website.
Designing your Web Pages
After you are done with getting domain name, hosting it on a reputable web host company, the next step is to begin to design the website. In this article, I will assume that you will be doing this yourself.
For the start, just try to put up something on the web first. The fine-tuning can come after you've figured out how to publish a basic web page. A readily affordable consideration is to use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web editor. With this kind of editor, you can put up a good looking website in few minutes without the hazzles of bothering to learn html codings. The WordPress is an examples of the editor.
There are many commercial and free web editors around. For those who don't mind spending money on a commercial program, Dreamweaver comes recommended by many webmasters. You can get a detail guide on how to use dreamweaver to build a website here.
A good free WYSIWYG I recommend to my blog users is Kompozer. You can get a guide on how to build and publish a website using KompoZer on the net.
There are many other web design software around. If you prefer not to use either of the above, you can find some other free html editors listed on the web.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is an integral part of web design effectiveness. SEO, consideration should not be left out until after the site is built, it should be integrated even during site design. The article Tips on How to Create a Search Engine Friendly Website is a must-read. Also, learn how to build and handle your site to rank high on Google and Bing since these two are currently most important search engines.
As you proceed, you will get to know and add to your knowledge on website design and management. The guide so far is enough to get you off well.
Test-run Your Website
Actually, this step should be carried out throughout the designing stage.
You web pages should be tested in the major browsers like Chrome, Internet Explorers and Firefox as you design them. The browsers are all free to download and use. It's only by testing the pages of your site on the browser that you can tell if they work well.
If you want to improve the chances that your website will work in future versions of all web browsers, consider validating the code for your web pages. What it means is ensuring that there are no HTML and CSS syntax errors. There are many free web page validators online that can do this job perfectly well for you. One good example of the validator tool which can even help fix errors for you is "HTML Tidy".
Submitting Your Site To Search Engines.
At this time, after you have rid your sites of syntax errors, you can submit it to search engines like Bing and Google.
When your site is ready, you can submit it to search engines like Google and Bing. The links you can use are below:
Bing's url Submission .
Google's url Submission site.
Apart from submitting your site to the search engine, you may also want to consider promoting it in other ways, such as the usual way people did things before the creation of the Internet: advertisements in the newspapers, word-of-mouth, etc. Companies like PRWeb, can help you create a press release of your site products/services and this will bring your site to be noticed in different news sites and blogs.
Other obvious ways of promoting ones' site include paying for adverts in Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Conclusion
I would not claim that the guide on how to design your website is exhaustive at all, but I think that it is good enough to get you to begin and to begin well.
Dr. Tony Iwuafor
A Physician and an Obsessed Blogger
Go To http://legitbz.com.
And Steal His Secrets of Internet Marketing
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