How to Design and Create a Website

Step One: Why Do You Need a Website?

  • To simply have an online brochure for your company?
  • To generate leads?
  • To sell something?  If so, just a few things?  A whole line of products?  A membership or subscription to your site or content?
  • To build an audience via news feeds, newsletters subscribers or social media followers?

Step Two: Design Your Website

The next step is to figure out what your site will look like, what information it will contain and how it will link together. This includes these four elements:

 

Layout

Using a computer program or old fashion pen and paper - lay out the design of each page of the site - this is called a wire frame.

Functionality

Or really - what do you need your website to do! Figure out the functionality you need - contact forms, social media links, newsletter sign up forms to simple buttons. And the biggest of all - shopping carts!

Structure

Figure out the exact content of your website and how it will be organized. How many pages you want or need will have a direct impact on cost of website Examples include "About Us", "Contact", "Portfolio", "Services", etc. .

Styling

Make it look good! each page will need to be styled with it's own graphics, images and buttons. Brainstorm about each element on the page, what purpose it serves and how prominent it's place must be.

Step Three: Create the Content

  • Every page must have content - if you don't have that you'll have to look to outside sources.
  • Simple copy is usually around $150-$200 per page.

Step Four: Build It

  • Do you need a logo or other graphic design work done? If you are doing a slider or other types of images - do you have the photography?
  • If you have wireframes and content - the design process becomes much easier as the designer only has to worry about about the look and feel - not organization and structure.
  • When using WordPress, this is where you pick the theme. If you want to use a one out of the box and not have to do much customizing - it is much easier to find what you need when you know what you need it to look like and contain.

Methods to Build a Website

Option 1: Website Builder

Today, there are all sorts of services available for creating a website easily.

  • Wix, Weebly and Squarespace area  few that will allow you to create a website based on their designs.
  • They provide a great deal of built in functionality.
  • If your site is relatively straightforward that can be a great way to go.

Option 2: WordPress

If you want to have control over your website including

  • being able to personalize the design exactly as you want it and
  • have your website be independent of your development platform

You could learn the basics of WordPress to develop it yourself. But, WordPress developers can create a better site faster, that will run faster, be eaier to maintain and work friendly to search engines!

Option 3: Custom Code

What?  This gives you complete control over what your website looks like and does.  And it will be much more immune to hacking.

Downside?  You guessed it - money and time.

Upside?  A website that does exactly what you want and one that you can more easily maintain for the future.

Step Five: Take it Live

Once development is done, the site is often all yours. Things to help make this happen:

  • Documentation
  • Training

Step Six: Keep it Working

All websites must be kept up to date and periodically updated in order to meet the following needs.

  • Security: security must constantly be updated and monitored as new hacks are always being created and being hacked is extremely bad for business
  • SEO: In order to keep Google finding you - fresh content is essential but how much more do you need? Sites created on WordPress tend to already have a leg up but there are tools you can use to get the website ready for SEO. These included added hyper-targeted keywords to titles, descriptions, alt tags and header tags, submitting an XML site map to search engines and optimizing your links.
  • Competition: is always up to something new as you should be paying attention.
  • Trends: people are always looking for the newest trend so make sure your site looks up to date from a visual and design point of view.