Design Your Website - Tutorial for Beginners

This step is intended to guide the beginners who want to learn how to design their web sites and which tools and skills they need to start a website.

You need to make sure you are one hundred percent positive you are happy with what you want to do and how you are going to do it before you start doing it.

The internet is the ultimate visual and psychological medium. It provides businesses with an unparalleled avenue to reach potential customers. In this visually engrossing world it is the copy, or words,on your website that have the greatest psychological impact on visitors and given this they become your most important communication and sales tool.

Another important psychological aspect of your website is the often over looked and definitely misunderstood online marketing strategy of colors. The same as we use words and phrases to describe and express our intentions color can be used to convey similar messages in more subtle and concealed ways.

Choose a template that best effect the personality of your company. Make sure you check what you can and cannot change when customizing your website. Change the look according to your taste. For those who have zero graphic experience, it may be more practical to purchase a web template that comes with a technical support to help in the design process.

To have an effective website, you need to carefully choose the right design for your website.

1. Layout

You website should have a layout that is attractive and understandable for website visitors. Things should be placed correctly on the website with easy to read fonts.

2. Content

Having just any content is not enough. The content on your website should be informative and useful to the website visitor. The visitor should also be able to understand what your website is all about.

3. Graphics

Care should be taken about using the appropriate graphics on your website. They should be related to the contents of your website. A point to remember, too many graphics on your website will keep website visitors with slow internet connects away.

4. Easy and quick navigation

Give your website visitors quick and easy access to your website pages. Do not make it too complicated and never forget to keep a link to the main homepage so that they are never stranded in another page.

Having an effective website with good layout, content, graphics and easy navigation will ensure that visitors to your website can easily read the contents of your website while getting information that would be useful to them and they will keep wanting to return to your site.

Design Your Website

One of the most popular HTML editors you can use is Dreamweaver. This editor will cost $399 but you can use the free editors.

To begin your website design get a free Template from the Internet.

Most templates come with placeholder logos/images. So you'll see a header image that says something like "Company Name." If you have web editing software, then you can customize these images for your site.

PhotoShop and Fireworks are quite expensive for the average consumer, so I would recommend an alternative solution like Paint if you are looking for something free.

After you download template, you create include files. That means if you update your left, right, top or bottom navigation, you only have to change one file and all the pages get updated at once.

If you plan on creating a large site, make sure you either download a template that has include files or create them yourself. (Do a Google search for "creating include files" for help with this.)

This will allow you to update all pages at once. Include files have made your life much easier.

Get a Designed Webpage from Your Host!

There are several pre-designed web pages which are usually available to you by your web hosting plans. You can choose one from among the ones presented to you.

All you need to do is to place the content in to those pages and save them properly. Now, open the "index.html", "index.htm", "default.html", "default.htm", etc. place your content into this page and save it. Go ahead and build other pages like your home page.

No matter what you decide on building your site, I hope you now understand the importance of at least learning the basics of building a web page.

You don't have to become a top notch programmer to build a fantastic site. You can do what I did and download a free template from another site and then use Dreamweaver to maintain it.