So you’re thinking about building your own website, but need to know the steps of how to make a website and what all goes into the process. First of all, congrats! It’s always fun and rewarding to learn something new–and by learning more about how to make a website, you’ll definitely come away with more insight and a significantly better working knowledge of the web design and development process. Let’s jump right into it then.
Here Is The Lowdown On How To Make A Website…
Step 1: Plan & Outline
You probably already have a vision of what you want your website to look like when it’s done. And if you’re like most, this big picture will change multiple times as you go through the web design and development process until it evolves into its final form.
The single most important thing you can do to create a website that is professional, effective, and ultimately meets all of your goals and objectives is to plan out the entire process with total precision. This is a big step, and there is a lot that goes into it. For example:
- What pages will you want to include as part of your site?
- How will the navigational structure of the site flow?
- What parts of the site will be top level pages in the menu?
- Which parts will be sub-level pages?
- What CMS (Content Management System) will you use to power the site?
- What is your timeline for completion?
- Will you do all of the graphic design work yourself or hire it out?
- Will you do all of the web development coding yourself or sub it out?
- Where will you find your stock imagery and photographs for the site?
- How will you achieve your conversion goals through the website?
- What 3rd party systems or custom coding will need to be completed for e-commerce or other proprietary components and features of the website?
- How will these systems integrate with each other and with all necessary external providers?
In other words, there really is a lot that goes into making a website, and planning it all out at the very beginning is immensely important to completing the project with any kind of success at all. Don’t be too afraid here though–planning is a matter of sketching out your vision, fine tuning the vision, and defining each of the components that will make the website complete.
Getting the overall flow and navigation of the site down pat will help make the other parts much more understandable. Many designers use flash cards, one for each page of the site, and lay them all out manually to help figure it out and visualize how each piece of the site puzzle will fit together. This is an excellent strategy.
Making a website is a big challenge. It’s not impossible for the do-it-yourself’er, but like anything, the more complex the website needs to be, the more difficult it will be to learn how to make the website and ultimately complete it.
Food for thought at this stage…You’ll definitely want to at least consider talking to a professional upfront before immersing yourself too far in the process–it’s a great way to get some pointers on the process, as much of the planning and outline stage is similar whether you are developing the site yourself or actually end up hiring a professional web designer to handle the heavy lifting for you and save you the time and trouble.
That brings the planning & outlining installment of this series to a close. It’s a big one because it is so important to the overall process of how to make a website. Next up, we’ll take a look at some of the next steps, including registering a domain name and setting up web hosting. See you next time!