Website Design

Once you have determined the purpose and functionality of your website it is time to perform the actual website design starting with some web page layouts. These initial page layouts should establish the general look and feel of the website and are an important step in the website design process.

Create Main Page

Once you have determined the desired functionality, content, and layout of your website it is time to create your main page. You may want to create several experimental (prototype) website designs and get opinions of family or friends to see which are the best website designs. At this point the effort is mainly dependant on your originality talent and artistic skills.

If creating prototype website designs, you may want to use a free web hosting service temporarily until you have firmed up the website design and are getting ready to go operational.

Check Viewing of Main Page

Viewers will look at your web page with several browsers and on computer screens with various resolutions. You should view your website, offline or online, with computers using resolutions from 640 by 480 at 256 colors to 1600 by 1200 with true color. You should view the site at a few intermediate resolutions. You should view your site at least with Mozilla and Internet Explorer at different resolutions. Other web browsers that you may want to vies your pages with include Opera. The reason to go to all this trouble is to prevent creating all your site pages, then determining you need to make a change, and having to go back and fix multiple pages. After you have viewed your main page with different screens and browsers you may want to make some modifications to the page.

Once you have settled on the major portion of your main page layout and created the main page, upload it to the web serving host you have chosen.

Get Opinions

At this point your website has a main page with links that may not work, but you can get opinions on how pleasing your main page is and whether it conveys the massage you intend. It is worth your while to go out to web hosting forums sites and ask others to view and critique your site. Don't be dissappointed if you get negative input. Most of the people are going to concentrate on telling you what they think you need to improve rather than what you have already done right. They are doing this for your good.

Make Modifications

Getting opinions and making modifications may take about one week. I usually use more than one web hosting forums site at different phases of the website design and refinement in order to get more variety of opinions as I optimize the site.