The first thing you should do before setting out to design your new website is find other web design and websites you feel inspire and engages as there may be elements you may wish to include in your own design.

If this is your very first attempt at web design then I would advise you don’t plan to push the boundaries of what the web can do. There are some outstanding effects we can now use in our pallet of tools, however, most of these will require a fairly good understanding of web coding in a variety of coding languages and these can take time to learn. This should not put you off as some of the best websites on the web are created using clever but simple design to bring the most out of a web page.

Please see some of these examples to give you an idea of what can be achieved:

http://www.studiobolster.be/

http://www.druckbar.info/

http://www.bigcartel.com/

Once you have an idea of what you want your website to look like, a good place to begin is putting your idea down on paper. At this stage you can move things about and change the layout etc without causing yourself too much grief. Doing this later on can be a lot more time consuming as many changes will require the re-writing of code and this can throw up all sorts of problems. You are likely to have to do this anyway but the more refined your idea is on paper, the less time you will spend fixing things later.

To build your site I would suggest you go either of two ways.

First is using a WYSIWYG program (what you see is what you get) as these allow you to build your website visually and considerable amounts of the coding will be done for you by the program you use. The reason I suggest this is because it will give you a work space you will find fairly straight forward to understand (e.g. if you need to move a picture from the right side of the screen to the left you will be able to do this with a simple align button as opposed to going into the source code and typing in the command manually). At the same time, these programs allow you to see the source code which is not only good for your understanding of the process but also essential when the WYSIWYG can’t perform the task you need it to.

The most popular WYSIWYG on the market is Adobe Dreamweaver and despite a few technical downsides, the program offers a vast range of tools and functions that can make designing and building a website very achievable. 

For information on purchasing Adobe Dreamweaver please click here, otherwise try using it on a friend’s computer or find by other means.

I would strongly recommend using Dreamweaver to start out with as it has a fantastic tutorial built in which takes you through all the necessary steps in setting up your base html and building elements and features such as menus and list items, integrating video and building simple contact forms.

If you would prefer to use free software then please see this link for a great list of your other options:

http://webdesign.about.com/od/windowshtmleditors/tp/free-windows-editors.htm

The Second option is to dive straight in and begin learning how to code from scratch. This may seem daunting when you first start out but persevere as once you learn the first couple of rules it becomes clearer.

For an excellent step by step guide in building your first site in code, please see http://www.goodellgroup.com/tutorial/chapter1.html

This fully comprehensive tutorial will take you through every stage required to construct and design using the latest coding methods.

Once you have built your site it is very important that it is uploaded to your server correctly and then registered with all major search engines, however, we will cover this in the next post as design your website is likely to keep you busy for a good few days.

In the next chapter we will look at uploading and testing your website. For now, Good luck!