How To Design A Business Website

First and foremost allow me to say that I will NOT be giving tips on how to work HTML. For that you can use Google's search engine or check out The Site Wizard. They seem to have quite a number of tips that could get you going in your quest to learn HTML.

When we discussed What Can I Sell On My Website, we also talked out choosing the RIGHT kind of website for our future online business and now it's time to design a website that really reflects and speaks for our product(s).

Going the sales, retail, or marketing website way is going be less difficult than the web application and information business way. For the latter, you'd need highly experienced web developers and that could eat deep into your bank account if you're not financially ready.

There are two ways to go in designing a website: You either do it yourself or get someone else to do it for you (Popularly known in the internet marketing circle as OUTSOURCING). Which ever way you decided to go, you HAVE to make sure two things are taken care of.

First, you have to draw a rough sketch of what you want the layout of your website to look like and what color combinations or palette would be perfect for it. Now layout refers to things like where you want the navigation area to be, where you want to use as ad space, how many columns the site is going to have etc. You can get ideas by browsing various sites you like and picking one or two ideas from them.

I've never really understood the whole concept of webs safe colors and color palettes so I basically go with my instinct MOST of the time. I fool around with different color combinations in my mind, put them in my rough sketch and see how they look. If I love the combination, I save it and look it after a week. If I still love it then, IT'S A KEEPER!

The goal here is to keep your viewers enthralled with the layout and color scheme.

With color scheme and layout out of the way, it's time to design the website for real. If you're going to do it yourself and know nothing about html, you could get some pre-designed templates from the web or your web host and just add your text and images and you're done.

PERSONALLY, due to my mild obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, I tend to prefer designing my site on my own. I NEVER OUTSOURCE. I sit down and tweak things till I'm completely satisfied with the results. I'm NEVER satisfied when I get people to do certain things for me. I believe in, if you want ultimate satisfaction, you got to do it yourself. But then again when I mess something up on my site, I get all worked up until it’s fixed again. LOL

To design your website yourself, you are going to need the following tools

1. An Image Editor for creating and editing images like navigation buttons, banners etc: I use Macromedia Fireworks but a free solution is GIMP 2.64
2. A “What You See Is What You Get” site editor to design the website: I use Macromedia Dreamweaver. A free solution that I also use is NVU
3. A text editor might be necessary in tweaking and editing the html code but I find that I really don’t need it. A popular FREE text editor would be Notepad that comes free with Windows
4. Four – Five different Web browsers: You need to check out what your site would look like on different browsers. Presently I’ve got Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Google Chrome, Opera & Avant on my computer

NOTE: Strive to keep your web design at nothing more then 640 pixels X 480 Pixels horizontally. This is because not everybody has a 21 inch monitor (1024 x 768 resolution). Some are still having 12 inch monitors and if this is the case of visitors to your site, they might end up having to scroll across the page to read every message on your site and that could be very annoying.

I personally prefer 700 pixels by 600 pixels as it gives me more space to work with though I could be losing a number of traffic.

With the above tools you are good to go, though somewhere along the line you’d have to read tutorials and guides that can help you learn XHTML for coding the site’s framework, CSS for giving the site some style, PHP for some of the site’s functions, and JavaScript for the site’s inner workings and other various functions.

Do please feel free to comment if I left something out. Thanks.

P.S: This post was supposed to come before Search Engine Optimization Tips. I guess I missed things up somewhere along the way. Do accept my apologies.

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