- Getting Started (cont'd)
The seven steps to designing your new website:
Plan
| Design | Create
| Check/Re-check
| Upload
| Promote
| Maintain
Designing Your Website:
The first thing you may wonder is why I split
designing and creating your website into two separate
parts. The answer...well, because depending on how you
choose to work it may be two separate things. In
Designing Your Website I'm going to talk about creating the
graphics, photos, and color schemes that will be used on your
page. In Creating Your Website I'll talk about actually
coding and putting together the site. You can certainly
do both together, especially if you have all the necessary
software on your own PC and many of the WYSIWYG HTML editors
lend themselves to putting it together as you go. But if
you'll have to do the graphics somewhere else or have someone
do them for you, you may need to create your site
separately. Up to you.
If your site won't contain any
graphics or photos, then you can skip right to Creating Your
Website where we'll get into suggestions for coding and
building the HTML of your site. If you will be using
graphics or photos then this is the section for
you.
At this point you need to have
some idea of how your finished site will look visually and
also some idea of how it will be navigated by the user.
It might help to sketch out some basic ideas on paper.
Don't worry if you're not an artist. Circles and squares
work great on paper to designate where things will go.
If you're not terribly creative, don't despair. Recruit
help. Almost everyone knows someone with some artistic
ability. Or maybe you already have a logo that was
created for business cards or stationary. Ask your
printer to get you a copy of the file. If they can
convert it to a .jpg or .gif format all the better. Most
graphics programs offer great effects and tools to help you
create what you might need without a lot of effort. Go
to our Graphics section to read more about these programs in
detail.
The first thing you'll probably
want to do here is decide on a color scheme for your
site.
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