Nowadays, learning how to create your own website design isn’t as hard as it used to be. As a matter of fact, you can learn to make a good website design in just a couple of hours if you follow the right approach.
How to Create Your Own Website Design: Steps To Follow
Creating your own website design can be boiled down to these following steps:
- You need to decide how you’re going to do it
- Design the website
- Get a domain name
- Publish it and optimise it for search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.)
How to Create Your Own Website Design
Step 1: Decide How You’re Going to Do It
Alright, let’s go over the most popular ways through which you can start your own websites. Now, there are numerous solutions. Some are flexible, while others tend to be more complex.
Using a Website Builder
In your quest of finding out exactly how to create your own website design, you have probably stumbled upon what is known as a website builder. This is perhaps the most flexible, easiest option out of the bunch. A single company will provide you with numerous templates and designs, an easy-to-use editor, appropriate hosting, a domain name, and needed support.
While this option is like heaven for beginners, experts can use it too if they can’t afford to waste time and want the easy way in.
Most of these companies allow you to create a free basic website on a subdomain. In other words, the website’s address will be yourname.websitebuilder.com, and it will feature ads.
You can obviously select one of their plans if you want your own domain and more flexibility and customisations. Prices usually start at around £5 to £10 per month and include all the essentials.
Advantages of Using a Website Builder
- Extremely easy to use.
- No need to install any software.
- You don’t need any background knowledge of web design to do it.
- Updates and security are handled by the providers themselves.
- Predefined, beautiful, and, more importantly, editable templates.
Disadvantages of Using a Website Builder
- Customisation is limited (depending on the website builder)
- Lack of flexibility
- Not the best option for long-term SEO
The best-known website builders are Wix, Weebly, and Shopify.
Using a Content Management System (CMS)
If you know anything about web development, then you’d know that many sites are created using HTML, CSS, and PHP, all of which can take a lot of time to learn and master.
This is why most people think that creating a website from scratch is a difficult process and can require a lot of coding skills, sometimes more than you think.
However, Content Management Systems or CMS, such are WordPress, cut down those times by a lot. They essentially work like website builders but are a bit more difficult to learn and use (still easier than coding it yourself, of course!)..
Website builders allow you to add simple content such as texts and images as well as overhauling the entire design of the website. However, a content management system such as WordPress is much more limited, and as far as appearances go, you are limited to the templates that are given to you.
There are plenty of CMSes out there, such as Drupal, Joomla! And Typo3. However, we are going to focus on the most popular one, which is, of course, WordPress, which is used to power 39.6% of the internet, according to Hosting Tribunal.
There are hosting companies that offer a one-click install, allowing you to get your hands on easy to edit templates and design options. These include Siteground and Bluehost.
The hosting, domain name, email address, and support will all depend on how much you’re willing to spend as well as your technical knowledge. It can be cheaper than ever if you handle most of it by yourself.
However, this might not be an optimal solution, especially if you are busy working or running a business. In this case, you are going to have to hire a web designer who is familiar with setting up a WordPress website.
One great advantage of WordPress is the fact that there are thousands of plugins out there that allow you to add special features to your website that were not initially included in the templates. An example of this is WooCommerce, which allows you to add a complete and functional online store to your website.
Another advantage of WordPress is its community. With so many people using it, it is easy to get help whenever needed. YouTube and internet forums can provide you with a lot of information about the platform. There are also thousands upon thousands of WordPress developers in the UK that you can get in contact with and hire online.
Out of the three main options on how to create your own website design, this is the one we recommend most.
Advantages of Using WordPress (or any other CMS):
- You get to choose the hosting company
- Perfect for multi-language websites
- You can access the whole source code
- Endless plugins
- Better for SEO (and other forms of marketing!)
Disadvantages of Using WordPress (or any other CMS):
- No technical support
- Creative freedom is very template-dependent
- Some plugins come with additional costs
- You might need to hire a designer or web developer if you’re not familiar with it
Coding a Website Yourself or Hiring Someone to Do It
The most obvious advantage to this is the fact that you get total freedom when it comes to the design of each and every corner of your website. You will need a lot of time and patience to pull this off. And, of course, you’d need to be very familiar with coding.
We wouldn’t recommend this for beginners since it can be a frustrating and very time-consuming process. However, if you’re keen on doing it yourself, places like Codecademy, Mozilla, or W2Schools are a good source of tutorials for beginners.
Good source code editors include Aptana Studio, NetBeans, and Brackets. They support HTML, CSS, JavaScript as well as PHP and are free.
Yes, the title of the article is how to create your own website design, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you could be doing it yourself. There are thousands of programmers which you can find online and hire on the spot, and most of them will do the job just fine as long as you specify your needs in detail.
However, If you can’t afford to do it yourself and hiring a programmer sounds like an expensive idea, then we recommend that you resort to the first option, and that is paying £10 a month for some website builder.
Advantages of Coding Your Own Website:
- The possibilities are limitless if you know how to code well
- Hosting is cheap
- Extremely flexible
Disadvantages of Coding Your Own Website:
- If you’re not familiar with coding, the learning curve is very steep
- Costs are hard to calculate
- Requires a lot of time and patience
Step 2: Plan Your Website
The second step in our journey on how to create your own website design is to come up with a plan, a recipe per se, especially if you lack experience in this domain.
In the case of creating a website, improvising is never a good idea. Planning, on the other hand, will help you to decide which sections do you need, the content that will be in them, as well as the design of the website as a whole.
Pick up a piece of paper and a pen and start writing down anything and everything you want on the website. Through brainstorming, you can create a mind map that will help you to properly organise your thoughts.
Once you have a draft of what the website will look like, ask people around you what they think and closely take note of their input. It can help you to broaden your perspective and make a better website.
Lastly, create a list containing all the pages that the website will have. Choose a title for each, describe what kind of content they’ll have, the purpose, keywords, and more.
Step 3: Design Your Website
In our explanation of how to create your own website design, we’re sure that we made it clear that designing a website is no easy task, regardless of what route you take. You’ve been to numerous websites throughout your life, and you’ve certainly noticed that websites with good designs are a minority.
Additionally, what was considered a good design a couple of years back is now considered dull and out of date. In other words, you want to make sure that your design keeps up with the times.
Here are some tips to follow when designing your website:
- Try to use light colours for the background (straight-up white usually works)
- Make sure your colour combos are attractive and complementary to each other
- Keep the design simple and clean, and make sure to leave space between each element
- Only use a few fonts, one for the titles, one for subtitles if there are any, and one for the text
- Make sure the style and format that you go with are consistent throughout the pages
- Make sure your website design is perfectly adapted for mobile devices
- Use professional-looking pictures only
- Be minimal about everything
Step 4: Get a Domain Name
Now that you’ve learned how to create your own website design and you’ve successfully put it to practice, it is time to get yourself a domain name. You can get a free domain that will obviously have the name of another company in it.
But we are assuming that you don’t want that, so you should purchase your own domain, preferably with a .com extension. However, if you are operating strictly in one country like the UK, you should get a .co.uk domain.
There is no shortage of companies who make a living selling domain names out there, so you can get your hands on one in a matter of minutes. Most of their prices range from £5 to £15 per year. We recommend Namecheap.
Of course, this all depends on where or how you decided to build a website because most website builder packages come with a domain name included. Sites like Jimdo, Wix, and Weebly all include a domain name for free in the first year of your subscription with them. After that, they charge you slightly more than, say, Namecheap, for example.
If you’re building the site yourself from scratch or using WordPress.org, then you’d also need to set up your own web storage. You can get your hands on one from the same place where you’d buy your domain name or a company that specialises in this, such as WPEngine or Siteground.
Finally, if you also need email addresses, check out Zoho Workplace. The service is very similar to Google Workspace, but it features a free plan hence why we mentioned it.
Do You Need Help?
Granted, creating your own website may be easier than ever these days, but the process can prove to be overwhelming and time-consuming for some, which is why you can turn to us for help (for both the design and the marketing apsects)!
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