Define your audience and their needs
Defining the purpose and goals of your website should be your first step. Focus on what you want your website to accomplish. Create a profile of your target audience and try to understand their needs and likes, and design the site with them in mind at all times. Take a look at competitor websites to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t.
easy navigation
To make your content easy to navigate for your target audience, make sure the links to the main sections of your website are easily visible from every web page. You want to invite people to view as many pages of your site as possible, so make it easy for them to find each page.
A good way to help you visualize the site structure is to create a flowchart of the entire website on paper. Think about how your users can structure the information within the site to help them find the information they need easily.
Try to keep the information on your first page as an overview so you don’t bog people down with too much information. They can then click on the links (clear and easy to use) to see more information on the topics that interest them.
design
Most web pages have a common structure consisting of a header and footer, a horizontal navigation bar at the top and/or a vertical navigation bar at the left of the page, and a center section for the page. main content.
This structure is based on simple and easy to understand design principles. If there is a lot of content, break it up into several different pages so your viewer doesn’t have to digest too much information on one page.
Keep the text simple and direct, and make sure the grammar is correct; check and double check to avoid appearing unprofessional. Text is harder to read on screen than in print, so getting your message across in a succinct, easy-to-understand way is crucial.
You should always keep your text blocks relatively small. Long paragraphs are harder to read and can quickly cause your audience to lose interest.
Stick to 2-3 different fonts at most, and make sure they are the ones typically found on most computers. San serifs are easier to read on computer monitors, so stick to them for main text and make sure your text is large enough for everyone to read. Relevant bullet points, lists, and photos can help break up your text.
Learn the basics of html
Learning the basics of html, even if you’re using WYSIWYG Front Page or Dreamweaver software, will help you understand how to create a web page and troubleshoot problems you encounter while using the software. Try to stay away from tables and create the pages using layers (divs) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
Tables mix “display” data with their content, which makes the file size of your pages unnecessarily large, since users must download this display data for each page they visit. But by using structural markup to create web pages, you can keep the actual content of your page separate from the way it’s presented.
Table-based pages are also much less accessible to users with disabilities and viewers who use mobile phones and PDAs to access the Web. And to change the layout of the site, all you need to do is change the style sheets; you do not need to edit the pages themselves.
using color
Creating a balanced color palette to choose your website color scheme will help you create a professional looking website. Bright colliding colors scream buff.
If you’re building a website for a company with a logo, start here. Upload the logo to your host server and go to a color palette website like http://www.colorhunter.com to create a palette, from which you can choose colors for the main banner, buttons, and text rollovers, etc. . And keep things simple and neat: empty space makes colors pop and text easier to read.
Optimization photos and images
Don’t use a chart just because; make sure there is a reason for its presence, i.e. it enhances user understanding and experience. A site full of unnecessary graphics looks amateurish and can get in the way of accessibility tools like screen readers.
Make sure the photos and images you use are clear and well optimized to reduce file size and increase page load times. A sure sign of an amateur website is a huge image page that takes forever to load. And your viewer will probably click away from the site before they have a chance to see it.
Creating clear, professional-looking graphics GIFs are actually grids made up of small square pixels. Data about each pixel is saved (so not lost) and you can save up to 256 colors. Pixels can also be transparent.
A GIF can contain more than one frame, so it can be animated. This is a good format for saving images with fewer colors, such as small tables and graphs, images containing text, and drawings.
JPEG files are a good file format for images with millions of colors, such as photographs, drawings with many tones, images that contain gradients, etc.
Design tips:
a.) Use design to highlight functionality. For example; using gradients on the buttons also helps make them look more ‘buttony’; different colored mouse over text draws attention to links.
b.) Be careful with animation and sounds unless they serve a specific function. It’s hard to concentrate on reading what’s on your site when things are turning on and off and flying around the page. And visitors with slow connections may resent that you wasted their time by forcing them to load animations and sound files against their will. Some recent research indicates that visitors targeted by flashing ads are more likely to leave the site immediately, and much less likely to bookmark the site, return to it, link to it, and recommend it.
c.) Do not use images as web page background. Image backgrounds scream ‘amateur’ because they are mostly amateur sites that use them. They take longer to load and the text on the background image is often difficult to read.
e.) Design the web page including all the elements within it for your audience. For example, create a relaxed atmosphere for a massage or therapy website using colors like lavender and blue. Use darker, understated, stronger colors for a more traditional finance website.
d.) If your business doesn’t already have one, create a logo for your site, display it at the top of every page, and add a link from it to your home page. It will make your site look more professional and create a sense of branding to help people remember your site and recognize it as their own.
It goes live
Accommodation
When it comes to accommodation, the cheapest is not always the best. For a little ‘beginner’; website, you shouldn’t need a lot of bandwidth (unless you haven’t followed the ‘image optimization’ guidelines!) But I wouldn’t recommend hosting your website with the cheapest offer available until you’ve verified that they can give you all the support for. may need as a newbie.
I would always recommend looking up a local contact phone number on the website of the hosting company you are considering using and calling to make sure there is a real person at the end of it.
Ask if you can get technical help from this number; they can only communicate by email for technical support. If they give you another number, ask how much it costs per minute and give them a call to make sure there is someone at the end willing to help you out as a beginner in case you have any problems connecting to their server, uploading your files, or ordering. your email accounts.
You should also make sure that email accounts are included in the cost, and if you have dynamic elements like a search function or an inquiry form on the website, check that the server supports PHP or ASP, etc. , necessary to allow this function to work. work, and whether that is included in the quoted accommodation price.
FTP
You can download free ftp software to upload your new website to your new hosting space from a variety of sources, including Filezilla or Smart ftp, or you can try a free trial with Cute ftp.
search engine optimization
Although professional web designers have website optimization in mind from the very beginning of design and development, as a newbie, you have to go step by step! So now that you’ve designed, built, and uploaded your website, take a look at some of the ways you can now start optimizing it for search engine ranking: