How To Build a Website
There are many methods you can choose when you decide to build a website. The method you select will depend on your knowledge of coding and/or programming. If you are a total novice to the web designer industry then there are programs that allow you to drag and drop items, place text via text boxes and change the colors with a click of a button. These are known as WYSIWYG editors (what you see is what you get), they are very helpful in order to get a nice looking website up and running in a short amount of time if you have no html (hyper text markup language, the coding used to build websites) knowledge. The main downside to using a WYSIWYG editor is that the coding will be full of rubbish and useless variables which will give you the disadvantage in the search engines as messy code will confuse the bots and penalize you for it. You could go through each page after it has been made and take out unnecessary bits of code making the page clean and user friendly, but by doing this you will have to have a good knowledge of html so you would be better starting from scratch in the first place.
If you are fairly comfortable with the way html works, you can make a website by just using notepad and saving the file with the .html extension at the end. This method is not used as often in today’s world as you can get programs such as Microsoft Front Page and Macromedia Dreamweaver. These both allow you to see a WYSIWYG view, a core code view and a split view in which you can make something and then tidy the code up straight after saving you a lot of hassle in the end. My favorite out of these two (and probably the most popular) is Macromedia Dreamweaver as it has inbuilt FTP access so you can manage a whole website from the one interface. You can select a remote view to see what’s on your server and make adjustments and update it direct to the server allowing you to view the changes made via the domain name the sites linked to.
The main benefit of this is being able to see what your website looks like in different browsers as they interpret the code in different ways which can make your site look absolutely fine in Windows Internet Explorer but completely messed up in Mozilla Firefox. While the majority of users use Internet Explorer you still have to make it compatible with Firefox as a small percentage use it and you would be loosing vital traffic if your site is not compatible with it. You are best downloading the main browsers (explorer, firefox, opera and any other you are willing to) and checking your site on a regular basis in each making it look the same in each one. Another way around it is to complete your site and then pick the next browser and adjust the code until it matches and then move onto the next one.
If you are not using a WYSIWYG editor then I always find it best to design each page in a program such as Adobe Photoshop so you can get the feel of the layout and color scheme before you actually start making the site in a code editor. The benefit of this is you may start coding your website and decide you want to change bits around, this is a lot harder once you have integrated the code into your website so by making the final layout in Photoshop and moving bits around with ease, it will make your life easier in the long run. Also it’s always easier to follow a template then thinking from scratch making it up as you go along.
Once you have mastered the basic html code and getting a website how you want it to look you can then move onto the more advanced coding which will make your website stand out from the rest of the competition in your niche. There are other variations of code such a PHP and JavaScript which you can learn in order to add more advanced features into your website.
Another common method of making websites in today’s world is using a CMS (content management system) which will make it easier to update and maintain your website once you have made a basic template adding ‘PHP includes’ where you want the data to appear. There are many free CMS templates available in which you can download for free and use to give a professional look to your website.
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Posted in Technology, World Wide Web
