Website Design

Website Design Website design is a complicated topic and learning to create websites requires lots of time and energy from interested users. Major websites require hundreds of designers and programmers to create and maintain. Facts like these can intimidate small business owners or bloggers who want to start their own websites. Fortunately, average Internet users can easily create websites using prebuilt templates and content management systems. These systems require varying skill levels. Some platforms, like Drupal or Joomla, require advanced programming skills to implement. Others target beginners and provide easy-to-use interfaces for adjusting settings. These are generally more versatile, but there are still powerful options available for the basic user.

WordPress Website Design

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems available and is the best fusion of ease of use and powerful customizability. A moderately tech-savvy user can install WordPress without any need for actual programming skills by following online tutorials. Many hosting companies, like DreamHost, offer packages with WordPress pre-installed on the server. WordPress’s dashboard lets administrators change themes, manage widgets, and edit content using a rich text editor. A large, active community supports WordPress, offering thousands of free themes, widgets, and plug-ins for your site.

Although WordPress seems like a blogging platform, you can use it to create various websites, including e-commerce sites.

Information-rich websites can use WordPress to publish static content by removing calendar widgets and organizing pages into categories.

Simple and free websites

For simple needs, platforms like Blogger or WIX offer free blogs but limit users’ ability to customize their sites. If you want full control but lack web design skills, you can hire a web design company. Many companies use prebuilt templates to create websites quickly and at a low cost for clients.

As your needs and budget grow, you gain more options for building a website tailored to your requirements. For large projects, you can hire a professional company to design your website entirely from scratch.

Website design incorporates many different elements. While many people feel comfortable writing their own content and maybe even building the website, they might not be proficient with graphic design. For this reason, templates and platforms like those previously mentioned exist. These make website creation a task simple enough for many users.

Get Creative with Website design

Creating advanced websites, such as those with homework help calculators or music-sharing systems, requires advanced programming skills and more powerful server software. Websites hosted on economy hosting plans may not be powerful enough for very complex applications.

Although websites can be complicated, they certainly don’t have to be. If you’re willing to put some effort into it, you can actually learn to design a basic website fairly easily. You’ll need to master at least two computer languages: HTML and CSS. Technically, neither of these are true programming languages, and they resemble normal English more than other computer languages tend to, making them easier to learn and read.

HTML and CSS

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the basic building block of every website. Even sites that use plugins or server-side languages, like PHP, eventually translate some of the content down into HTML. When your web browser loads any web page, what it’s actually doing is getting an HTML file, which is simply a text document, from the server, which is just another computer. HTML tells the browser what content to display and provides ways to load images and create more complex graphical interfaces.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) tells the browser how to display the content described in HTML. In earlier versions of HTML, content formatting, like font, color, text sizes, and margin lengths, among other things, had to be included in the HTML document. CSS was created as a way to pull this information out and put it into a new document. Much of the stylistic information in HTML documents was repetitive. Placing it in external CSS documents allowed web designers to write this information once and then reference large groups of formatting information simultaneously.

This might sound complicated, and it is, to some degree. Don’t get discouraged if you want to design your own website. Start, and you’ll be surprised how quickly you can progress and pick up new skills. Look for an online tutorial or a book on HTML and CSS, and you’ll usually be able to create a simple web page with some formatted text by the end of the first chapter.

Find your online presence

With so many options for getting an online presence, it’s no wonder that there are so many websites in existence. Websites can serve a wide-ranging smorgasbord of purposes, from selling products online to holding a repository of information to hosting discussions in online communities to being simple personal information pages or portfolios. Whatever your intentions for creating a website, you’re sure to find success from having an online presence, and the process of getting online isn’t that difficult.