Web Design Planning

In the third lesson we will take a look at some preliminary design tips, things you should always keep in mind before you ever begin designing your website.  The first tip is more of a guide, some rules to follow when picking out a design.  Below are the steps we have always used.

Look around the web, find lots and lots of sites you like the design of, keep notes of sites you like and why you like them.  This is an important step because it often takes a lot just to get your hands around what you are going for.  In the beginning you might not be sure of what you want or what your limitations might be, many people love the thought of having a flash website but when they realize they cannot possibly make changes add content or manage the site without help things change pretty quickly.  It is still good to list off as many options as you can to come up with the perfect list.

Look through several template option across several sites.  There are a lot of sites on the web that sell premade templates that often times can look very similar to what you are looking for.  The point is this, the hardest part about website design is getting started, starting from scratch can seem overwhelming and there are a lot of aspects to website design other than simple html code.  While these lessons will teach you the code you need to know doing the design work is the most difficult work of all for most people.  If you use a premade template, you need only master changes to the existing design, minor color changes, image changes and things like that are a lot more palatable for someone just starting out.

Should you decide to go the template route the steps that follow are pretty simple.  It doesn't matter if you are using standard html, blogging software like wordpress, or a content management system like Drupal or Joomla, there are loads of great templates to help you get started.  If you choose to want to tackle things from the very beginning we applaud your efforts and we are going to try and give you every possible tool to make that happen.  The nice thing about coding your own site from scratch is that the code will be clean, you are not relying on someone else's code.  Why does that matter?  Often times there are issues with websites code, errors and things of that nature that you can inherit when you don't do the code yourself.  Most of the time this is not an issue but it is something you should keep in mind.

So what does it all mean?  It doesn't matter if you want to start from scratch, or use a template to get your website going.  There is much to learn and from our experience most people's first try at a website won’t be their last.  Our website has been done and redone almost ten times as we got more skilled and the demands of our users have changed.  It us just a part of life, as you learn more you will want to do more, it’s important to view your website as a constant work in progress, if you can do that, be open to any change any time life will be a lot easier.  Take your time planning out what you want because that is the hardest step of them all, it may not seem like it now but trust us, were still not all that sure what we like.

We have always used an excel spreadsheet to plan out our websites so we will attach our planning outline below.

Website Planning Spreadsheet