Designing Your Own Website - Where To Start

Hi,
If you were building a house, you wouldn't decorate, hang the curtains and lay the carpets before you completed the construction work. Yet this is the type of mistake that many people make when building a website. A little extra time spent at the planning stage will save you a lot of headaches later on when you're designing a website. Before you even think about the website's design or the structure, you need to ask yourself three important questions :

Who is the website's audience?
Some websites are aimed at a global audience, but most target a specific geographic area, interest group or age range. You need to ensure that the style and content of your website are appropriate to its audience and that the choice of domain name and hosting are appropriate for the country or countries you are targeting.

How will visitors interact with the website?
Many websites simply provide information, but increasingly visitors expect to be able to leave comments, interact with other visitors or purchase goods from a website. The demand for this additional interactivity may steer you to include a blog, forum or an online store in the plans for your website.

How will the website be maintained?
If you are a competent web designer who is building and maintaining the website yourself, then you have a great deal of freedom as to the software or technology you use to build it. However, if the site is to be maintained by a number of different contributors, some of whom have little or no web design experience, you'll need to provide a suitable multi user development environment. In most cases, this will involve using either one of the online website builder programmes such as Weebly and Mister Web or a content management system, such as Word-press, Joomla or Drupal.

The next stage of the planning process is to consider the three main elements that will come together to create the finished website :

The Site Structure

The Written Content

The Design of the Web Pages