Creating a website is time consuming and it often cost a lot of money. When building a website, you must first make a plan for your website. You need to know what is it for, how you are going to make it popular and so on. If you will be building the website all by yourself, the hardest part is always to answer the “how?”. If you are an expert, everything will be easy but if you are not, you might end up consuming a lot of time and still not know the right codes to make your website appear the way you want it to be and have the functions that it really needs. You need a lot of skills to create a good website or a lot of money if you hire a website designer. Now, this is not the case. You can easily create a website using WordPress!
What is WordPress?
If you are familiar with Blogger.com, then you won’t find it hard to use WordPress. WordPress is a complete set of ready to use codes that you can upload to your web host so that you can easily create a website. After uploading the files to your web host and setting up the database configuration, you can already view your website.
No need to design themes – just select one and install
WordPress have lots of themes that you can choose from. There are free and premium themes out there that you can use on your WordPress. This will help you save a lot of time and it will cost you a lot less than hiring a professional web designer. When choosing a theme, choose those which can serve the functions of your website. You can install any themes you want and check if it fits your taste and if it can use the functions that you need.
No need for codes – Plugins
This is probably the best advantage of using WordPress. You don’t need to think of the codes just to add functions that you need for your website, there are built-in functions called plugins which you just need to install into your website and that it. You can add Facebook likes, Sitemaps, add to cart plugins and many more.You do not need to be an expert.
Easy to maintain
With WordPress, you can easily create back ups of your website. There is a built-in tool which will let you save a copy of the blog post, pages and other contents in your website. This is very useful especially when your website is hacked. You can easily restore the contents of your website.
Do’s and Dont’s in Designing a Website
When it comes to designing your web site, there are some definite dos and don’ts to be considered. While things such as templates and WYSIWYGs (What You See Is What You Get – design software that lets you see the finished page as you design it) make it seem simple to create your site, these don’t take some vital things into account. You might end up designing a site that no one but your family and friends will ever see.
Before you begin the design
Before you ever begin the actual design of your site, there are some issues to address. First, you really do need to brainstorm the exact goal of your site. If you are planning on selling a product then you need to be thinking about who your target audience will be and how best to sell to them. Even if your site is not for business purposes, knowing who you want to attract to your site is essential.
Write out your text. What you say is more important than any other element of your site. You need to have text that is easy to understand and succinct. Use the fewest words possible to explain your site and what its purpose is. Check and then re-check things like spelling and grammar. Nothing will put a visitor to your site off quicker than misspelled words.
Building the site
The actual design of your site involves a lot more than just putting up your text and your pictures. You need to have navigation that is easy and understandable. You have to have things coded correctly, such as alt tags. You have to have a good keyword density but not overdo them. The pages need to load quickly, which means optimizing any images. Making your site ready for search engines has a lot of steps and is essential if you are going to get traffic to your site.
You really need to do your homework and learn all you can about design, coding and search engine optimization. If this all seems a bit overwhelming to you, then you really need to consider leaving it to a professional.
Web design is becoming a very easy task these days. It is also said to become more affordable. One can even do their own web design. Before considering personal preference, there are basic rules that you need to apply. Basic guidelines are set to be followed by web designers even those who are already considered experts in the industry.
There is much more to web design than learning html tags, in order to be a good web designer there are a few basic points you need to learn including html, CSS, and structure. If you are looking to become a web designer you need to be willing to constantly update your knowledge. With different platforms and coding available the web design field is constantly changing and if you don’t relearn and re-skill, your web design skills could soon become outdated, it is very similar with anything else online.
Coding: If you never learn how to code or design you will always be stuck with WYSIWYG. This is especially important when mistakes happen and you need the skills to clean then up. If you able to hand code in a text editor this means you will know your code much better and have greater control in editing and fixing problems. Knowing how to code means you can include items like CCS in to your work more easily.
CSS: This brings us on the next important part of the webmasters world, CSS or cascading style sheets. With CSS you are able to transform your entire site by simply editing one file. Most websites now are created using CSS and it is an essential part of knowledge to have.
Structure: You need to have a clearly defined navigation system and be able to structure your website in to blocks, frames or layers. Have clear layout and make full use of the space and having clear alignment. The best front for the human eye to read is sans-serif at a 10-12point size. When choosing colour it is important to use colours that are easy on the eye as bright harsh colours strain the eye after time. Make full use of white space as places for visual relief. Simplicity and clean modern design works best with cleaver use of shadow to give the page depth.
The most common platform used now for web designer is wordpress because of it’s ease of use and content management system. It’s platform is powered by PHP and MySQL and these can come as a template which can be changed with the use of html and php knowledge. The many features wordpress allows makes it ideal for not only web design but SEO, including integrated link management, permalink structure, trackbacks and pink backs.