website design. three different techniques
Website last updated: Saturday April 27, 2019
If you want to design your own website you basically have three options to choose from. The choice you make will depend a lot of your experience with computers, the budget you have available and your personal tastes.
If you can try all three options so much the better but don't purchase any sophisticated software until you have done a little research with Wordpress and on line website designers. I've listed the good and bad points of each as a guide.
Design your website on line using a website builder
There are quite a few websites where you can design your own website on line without any knowledge of coding or HTML. Many of them will give you a free trial so you can see if they are right for you. The advantage of using this approach is that they all employ drag and drop technology which means you can soon put a website together by just adding any text and pictures you require. Most of them give you a free domain name and of course they host the website for you. They all also have a large number of templates to choose from so you can personalise your website.
The downside the this approach is that you don't have control over the HTML, (the code that actually builds your website), which in itself, doesn't matter but without this access it's very difficult to make your website search engine friendly. It's also unlikely that the templates that are on offer will match any design that you have in mind so if you are a company you may not be able to include your logo and company colours. The other downside is that you usually have to pay a monthly or yearly fee. Here's a website that compares the various on line website builders.
Use a blogging platform such as Wordpress or similar
Millions of websites are done using the famous blogging platform known as Wordpress. This is available free and the only costs are the server costs required to host your website. There are a huge number of plug ins available for Wordpress which enable you to personalise it and add information which search engines will recognise so you can achieve good search engine optimisation.
Wordpress can be very tricky to install although some hosts such as Ipage make it easy. It's worth finding out, in advance, how easy it is to install Wordpress before choosing a hosting company. The plug ins mentioned above seem to be always updating so you have to keep on top of those to ensure you are using the latest versions.
It's fair to say that Wordpress is not for novices but at the same time is not as complicated as designing your own website as in the example below.
Design a website on a computer using dedicated software
I have used Adobe Dreamweaver for many years and recomend it but it's not for the faint hearted. This type of website design software is known as a WYSIWYG editor. (What You See Is What You Get). This means you can design your website right in front of you by dragging things into place just as you can with an on line editor but you can also get at the underlying HTML code which is essential if you want to make the web page search engine friendly.
The only cost you incur is that of hosting the website as with Wordpress above and you can upload your web page from Dreamweaver directly to the server once you set up your FTP, (File Transfer Protocol), connection.
Dreamweaver support Cascading Style Sheets, (CSS), and most other web standards you can think of. The downside? It costs a lot of money to buy and is definitely not for beginners. This website was done in Dreamweaver.