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Learning how to make a website is a big feat. It’s worth it for those who are interested, but actually making it happen from start to finish takes quite a bit of time, energy, and effort. We’ve covered many of the steps of how to make a website—everything from planning the project, to hosting, to registering a domain name, and everyone’s favorite step—the website design process. That leaves us at step 5—actually programming the site so it works in the real world.
How do you program the website?
First things first, you’ll need to know what language and/or platform the site will be developed with. Is it going to be built with an integrated CMS (Content Management System)? Is it going to have blog software as part of the overall system? Will WordPress play a part in the overall website project? Custom shopping carts or other hand-built features needed to make it work?
HTML & CSS is the standard. But you’ll also run across PHP, SQL, MySQL, XML, other databases, and many other languages used in coding. AJAX, JQuery, and many more…even Flash. All things considered, if you were to pick any major website at random, the chances are pretty good of it using pretty much all of these languages and web development techniques in harmony to create the overall functionality the website needs. Long story short—web development is very complex and really not the territory for amateurs.
What about developing your own website from scratch?
Well, for the persistent crowd that wants to learn the ropes and make it happen from scratch, the easiest place to start would be to keep it very simple with just the most basic HTML/CSS platform. Just the basics. Even this takes time, but with some good tutorials you might be able to find here and there on the web, it is possible. The best bet for the determined do-it-yourself’er who has time and the level of commitment that it takes to learn to program for the web would be to find a good book or class that covers one web language at a time from the very beginning. Again, HTML would be the place to start here.
The thing about web development is that there are lots of pros out there who can seemingly breeze through the whole site’s programming, A-Z, in just one coding session. That might be a little bit exaggerated, but the experts who write code for the web day in and day out know their stuff and are very fast and efficient at going about what they do.
And when you consider what a web design/development team can do, the efficiencies begin to add up. For example, here at Sleepless Media, our web designers know exactly what the development side of the project will need to do what they do best. A team based approach is actually very practical—and there is a ton of time and money to be saved when the entire process of how to make a website is part of one proven system from beginning to end.
