Thinking about building your own website? Here are six beginner tips for building a website straight from our web design team here at Posse.
Do not go for free or cheap hosting for your site. While this may not sound like a building tip design and hosting can go hand in hand. Some free hosting companies may clutter your site with unwanted ads. Also, we now live in a smartphone driven world. A dynamic website is a must, yet some free and/or cheap web hosts do not support such a site.
If you are looking to launch quickly it may be conducive to integrate open source or freeware based scripts. With a bit of research and testing it is possible to find quality freeware that can allow you to add shopping carts, chat functions, and other such bells and whistles to your site. While it might not sound like a big deal, when you go to update your site’s look or feel having fully integrated coding could potentially make the process much more difficult. Using open source or freeware coding can help you to keep the design coding and function coding separate. One thing to ensure however is that you have a thorough grip on the programming language used to develop said coding so that you do not make a major mistake when integrating it.
Speaking of coding, if you plan on building your own site make sure that you understand Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Once upon a time it was acceptable to use simple html to make many of your styling changes when building websites. Now coding has become much cleaner allowing for easier edits and faster load times by adding styling code into a CSS. Rather than having to go in and update code across the various pages of your site you can edit the CSS and have it apply site wide or have it tie to a single page – which ever you choose. CSS also offers another bonus – it allows you to determine the default properties of HTML tags. This means that those elements that might not otherwise render properly across each of the various web browsers can now be easily corrected thus doing away with the despised browser compatibility issues.
Along those same lines, make sure that you are testing your site across the various browsers as you build. This will help you to identify any potential compatibility issues upfront rather than having to fix them post-launch. The main browsers to check these days include: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, MS Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera. Many people forget to check Opera but the fact that Opera is used heavily on gaming systems by Nintendo and on mobile devices it is certainly important to consider.
Do NOT add your email address to your website! This cannot be stressed enough. There are plenty of hackers, spammers, and such who scour the web for email address of potential targets. Having your email address on your site is like putting out a welcome mat. Rather, add a contact form. This will help you in two ways. It will protect you from potential spam and will help you to achieve lead capture as well.
Do NOT rush your web design. An outstanding website does not happen in a couple of days. Poorly rendered pages can help to brand you as being sloppy or cheap. If you are designing a page and it looks bad don’t feel bad about tossing it and starting over.
Remember: there is no substitute for great web design. If you find yourself having a hard time getting the hang of it or in creating the perfect site it may be time to call in someone with more experience. It is much better to have a site that is responsive, functions great, and looks outstanding than to settle for one that looks cheap and does not deal well with mobile.