A well-designed website provides more than just a “pretty face”. Effective design can attract new visitors and help users understand the product, brand or company you want to promote. This is made possible by a variety of metrics, including images, text, and interactions, that focus each element of the website on a particular objective.
Nowadays, it is not enough to have a website, it must be done effectively and it must have functions that are useful to visitors, which is why web design has become so important. Designing an efficient website starts from the moment we think about having one.
More and more websites are being designed as the years go by and if you want to know how to create a website since you are considering starting a business or creating a personal website, I’m not going to lie: Creating a free or two-step website is very complicated, but don’t worry, as long as you have a little bit of interest, you can create the best website in the world.
Keeping in mind that the most important thing is always to figure out what to do before you do it, so here are the next 8 steps:
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Focus of the website
Before starting, it is important to figure out what to develop. Web pages can have different purposes and, depending on what you want to do, you will have to set up one structure or another. Design style, content, keywords you wish to target, contact form, photos, videos, etc.
Type of website:
- Website/personal portfolio.
- Company/Company website
- E-commerce
- Service page
- Login page
It is important to define this step as clearly as possible because the focus of the website has the greatest impact on the entire project. This defines the basis of the site. However, always remember to be flexible because it should be able to grow with your company or brand.
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Choose a domain and hosting
Without these two elements, it is impossible to have a website. Hosting is the place where the web pages and all the content they compose are hosted. Depending on the size of the website, you will need a more powerful web server. For example, e-commerce with a large number of products will require a lot of space.
However, with a company site that only provides information and has no internal applications, you will not need a lot. At the same time, the domain name is the name you assign to the Web; you can convert the IP address to find it easily. It is important that the domain is a name that is easy to remember.
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Choose the ideal CMS for your website and install it.
Leaving behind those “three clicks” design tools, we find that there are a number of content management systems that allow you to create web pages from scratch with good results. WordPress is a good choice for creating web pages. The manager provides the best results and also includes a WordPress chat service, which allows you to communicate quickly with users. Drupal or Magento are other quite powerful CMS that can be used to create websites.
Prestashop or Shopify focuses on creating online stores. However, WordPress is an easy-to-use manager that can be used both when designing the Web and to manage it. On the Internet, there are many articles and tutorials to learn how to manage a website from scratch in WordPress. If you want to create a simple and powerful page, it is recommended to use it because it gives the possibility to be positioned later among the first results of Google and to be visually attractive.
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Choose keywords
It doesn’t matter if your goal is just to have a platform that current customers can access, or if you are looking for a platform to attract new customers. As long as these people enter the search engine and enter certain keywords, your site will appear! Although this can be a challenge, if you have already decided to create a website, it is better to be effective from the beginning and optimize it.
When creating a list of keywords, you should focus on how visitors or customers search for the company’s products/services and, on this basis, choose the most important words to develop the content of the page. All websites are driven by their content; this is what makes websites effective and successful. Therefore, this part of the process is very important and you should pay close attention to it.
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Organize the web structure
The concept of web structure refers to the organization and distribution of elements in a website. At the same time, determine how the different pages relate to each other; which will be the home page and which will have to rely on other pages; which pages should be displayed in the top menu, and which should be displayed in the footer. When someone thinks about the design of a web page, they can only stay on the visual surface, but the architecture is also important to get good results.
Some tricks to create the best web structure
– Don’t overthink the number of internal pages. How many pages are appropriate? The number depends on the areas of operation of the website, but it is true that the more pages, the more difficult it is for users to navigate. Especially when there are several pages.
– Go for minimalism. In addition to following this design trend, simplicity can also help to understand the appearance of the right menu: less is more. It is enough to include only the basic elements and keywords.
– Focus on usability and user experience. User experience is a series of factors related to the user’s own interaction on the respective website. In other words, when creating a page, you must consider who will enter the page and how we can make it easier for them to achieve their goals. This is usability, which refers to the elements of the web that users can easily use.
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Set the design of the website
If you’re a person with a special taste for aesthetics, then this is, of course, your favorite place, and it’s also a place for you to stay. If you’ve ever had a Blogger or WordPress blog, you may have spent hours discovering new templates, tweaking colors, and moving elements to different locations on the page. The same is true when designing a website but on a larger scale. Nowadays, you can buy and install an unlimited number of themes in WordPress to create pages. If you are not familiar with CSS and HTML, I suggest you do so. Even if you do, it is recommended to do so, because it saves more time. For example, on ThemeForest, you can find hundreds of different themes for your website and then choose the theme that best suits your search based on your company’s department, color, or favorite page style.
Many themes and templates include visual generators to create pages, which will make your design easier. Depending on the theme you choose, you will use one visual generator or another. However, you can always install your favorite one in the future. When creating a website in WordPress, you will be able to include a number of plugins needed to complete all the functions you want the website to have. You can use plugins that include adding new visual generators, or you can add tools to help optimize internal pages, such as Yoast SEO.
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Watch out for text, images, and video
When creating website content, you may find it is not as simple as it seems. But this is not impossible.
– Mark up the content of different pages based on keyword research.
– Use language that suits your business and audience. Depending on the person you are talking to, you may speak one way or another.
– Maintain your home page correctly. The user knows that the location of the home page is important as the first impression.
– Watch out for spelling and grammatical errors.
– Use clear and direct sentences.
– Use strong call-to-action phrases to grab the user’s attention.
Where can I get the image? The best option is always to take a photo so you can use your own images without any problem. In fact, there are free image libraries that can manage this well. It also depends on the type of website you want to create. I explain. Imagine the website of a restaurant, whose image is not the image of the restaurant itself. does it make sense? If you go to a restaurant after browsing the website and the situation is completely different, you may not have a good opinion. On the other hand, on some sites, the image is irrelevant or irrelevant to the business. For example, a plumbing company’s website will not need the same pictures as a fashion company.
Add a blog, and don’t forget about RRSS
Having a blog on your website is ideal for generating content on a regular basis and attracting new readers. This will improve Google search rankings and allow you to target certain words that cannot be segmented. At the same time, through blog posts, you can write articles that are of interest to your company’s target audience, so that you develop inbound marketing strategies to enhance certain aspects such as helping to make the decision to purchase the published products or services.
If we think we can complement the elements of your digital identity, social networks are your best ally. In addition to including your social profile so that users can easily find you, it is also fun to add compliments to share content on social networks, which encourages new visits and readings.
If you put these steps into practice, you will see that it only takes some time, research, creativity, and the integration of basic tools into your website to be successful. Don’t let time pass and start making your business profitable.
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