How does designing a website work?
There are a lot of things that you need to think about when you are designing a website. The process can be fairly simple or it can be quite involved depending on the type of site that you are trying to build. That being said there are some basic steps that you will go through for any site that you design.
The first thing that you have to do when you are designing a website is to make sure that you are clear on the purpose of that site. There is a reason that you are building the site, something that you want it to accomplish you need to make sure that you design your site to reflect that. A site that you want to use to make direct sales will be very different from a site that you want to use to provide information for example. Make sure that you know right from the start what you want your site to accomplish.
The next step in the design process is to lay out your site. One of the critical factors when you are designing a site is that it be easy to navigate, in large part this will depend on how well your site is laid out. You should make sure that you have your sites linked together in a logical way and that sites that are related to each other kept in the same menu. Not only will having a site that is well laid out be easier to navigate it will rank better in the search engines.
The next thing that you will have to decide on is the appearance of your site. For branding purposes your site should have a consistent look throughout, it should also have a some unique touches so that it will stand out. From a more practical standpoint you want to make sure that the text is easy to read, and to skim, most people will skim rather than ready your text. You also want to make sure that pages don't appear to be too cluttered. A few graphics are fine but you have to make sure that you don't over do it.
Once you have an idea of what you want your site to look like the next step is to actually build it. This may be fairly simple if you are using templates or it may be quite involved if you are building it from scratch. Once the site is built you are going to want to make sure that you test everything on the site thoroughly. This is when you want to make sure that your site looks and works the way that it is supposed to. You will probably find somethings that need to be fixed, this is just part of the process. Once you are happy with your site and you know that it works properly you are ready to go.