Starting Your Own Site #2

In the last segment, we spoke about picking a name for your site and what to do next.  Now we are going to cover some of the design do’s and don’ts. These are not absolute rules, but more like some helpful tips.

First, you must decide whether to design and code the site yourself, or if you are going to hire a designer. There are pros and cons to both decisions …

A Homemade Website

• Pros – You will save money and learn a great deal.
• Cons – It takes along time to learn a great deal about programming.

Novice Website by Some Do-Gooder

• Pros – You will save money, but results may vary.
• Cons – Lack of experience can lead to a poor site design or navigation.

Professional Website by a Professional Designer

• Pros – A contract to guarantee your results, it will look like you want it to.
• Cons – The cost of a good designer can be high. Prepare for a lot of questions.

If you decide to go it alone here are some of the things you should do:

• Use CSS – It will save you tons of time, make your page load quicker and make changes a simple task.
• Use Browser safe fonts- Nothing is worse than having to download a font so that you can view a website.
• Use Browser safe colors – This is close though.

Here are some things not to do:

• Use extreme colors- remember bright pink and neon green don’t go together in real life, so they won’t on the web either.
• Don’t use full images- If your image is 400px by 400px don’t just use the tag to resize it, open it in a graphics program and do a resize.
• Code for only 1 browser- This is not a 1 browser world, your site should work in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

If all else fails you can go and get a free web template online. Or spend some money and have a designer make you a template. Which ever step you choose will eventually lead to the next step in our process, which is search engines and how to get noticed.