The Basics of Creating Your Website

Creating a website, especially if its your first rodeo, can be an incredibly daunting task. Planning, worrying, revising, re-planning, building, editing, revising, re-building, etc. can lead you down a long and dreadful road that seems like it'll never end. Luckily with a bit of cautious and careful planning, you'll be on the road to creating a masterful website that you and your audience will love in no time flat!

To really break down the topic of building a website, let's take a look at some really simple and basic steps. These steps will make the process easier to wrap your head around and much more digestible. They'll also give you a playbook that'll help you stay on track!

Step 1. Pick the Subject of Your Website

If you are creating a website for a client, or if you're creating a website for your preexisting business, then this is likely going to be the easiest step you'll have to take (yay!). Picking the subject of your website right off the bat is crucial. This is because it will likely affect every aspect of your website and its design going forward.

For instance, if you're creating a website for an author or a blogger (or something similar), then you'll want to begin the process by planning around the fact that your website is going to be very text heavy and will need to feature that text in a way that's elegant and palatable to readers.

Step 2. Create a Bare-Bones "Skeleton" for Your Website

The next step in the process of creating a website could be to create a bare-bones structure for your website. Now that you know the topic you'll be creating your site around, you can start deciding on the different pages that you'll need.

To continue our example of creating a blog-themed website - now that you know you're creating a website around a blog you may decide that you want a home page, a contact page, and a page for the blog itself. Or you may decide that you want your home page to cover all of that, with a sub-page for the blog.

No matter what you decide about which pages, it can be very helpful to get out a notepad, excel sheet, or something similar that you can write down different pages, sections, and specifics you know you'll want. You can then create a system (like drawing a line) connecting different pages across the site to show how you'll want users to navigate.

Step 3. Start Creating a Theme for Your Website

With a subject and a structure in place, you can now begin thinking of aesthetics. For most people, this can be the most fun (and most stressful) part of planning a website. You get to pick which fonts, colors, accents, types of images, and types of graphics you'll include on your site.

Step 4. Insert Placeholder Copy and Images

Here is where you finally begin putting pen to paper. You take your subject, your skeleton site, and your theme and begin combining them on a digital version of your website.

OOPS, the only issue is that you don't yet have all of the images and words (or copy) that are going to go on your website!! That's okay - at this step in the process it can be really helpful to just slap up some images that have a similar color or theme that you're planning on having. You can also include some placeholder text and titles, just so you remember where you're planning on everything to end up. Personally, I like to include small jokes to myself like, "This is a Title" or "This is where text will eventually end up going when I finally get around to writing it". Its goofy, but it makes the process a little more enjoyable, and that's what its all about, right?

Step 4. Tweak and Edit

With placeholder text and images in their place, you may start to notice some things you're less than thrilled about with your site. This is a NORMAL part of the process. Sometimes the things we plan on paper don't look as amazing in practice. Take this time to start brainstorming fixes to whatever bugs arise or visual changes need to be addressed.

Also keep in mind that you'll need to begin setting things like spacing, font size, margins, etc. that will affect how different elements of your website move at different screen sizes.

Extra Note: This could be a great place to send your rough draft website to friends and colleagues to get an idea of what's good, what needs improving, and what might need to be ditched all together.

Step 5. Insert Your Final Copy and Final Images

Once you've tweaked your site and gotten some feedback from friends and colleagues, you can begin inserting final versions of copy, images, and graphics where you've left the placeholders. While this would be a difficult step to skip altogether, sometimes a line of placeholder text or an image may slip through the cracks, so make sure you take a good and thorough look through of your website before you publish it.

Step 6. Connect a Domain

The last step (of our basic step) is to connect a domain and publish your site! Congrats! With all of that work, you've accomplished creating and publishing a desktop website! Don't forget to check and adjust how the mobile and tablet versions of your site look, too.

If want to learn more about the beginning stages of creating and setting up a website - don't hesitate to reach out to us. We'd be happy to get your website up and running or help you along the way!

Futurist Horizons is a website design and marketing company that specializes in creating effective and accessible websites and marketing content for businesses.