Creating Your First Website

Whether you\'re just entering the website development field and want to get started on your first, full-blown website or you\'re an amateur just trying to put together your personal website, it can be a daunting task when you see all of the jargon and options available. Don\'t worry, most aspects of website development are actually pretty straight-forward. The confusion is usually in the terminology and the complicated-sounding technologies you\'ll be using.

Almost all of website development is about understanding Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and the design elements of making a functional website. When you see a good site on the Web, you usually don\'t notice the design elements very much. That\'s what makes the sites so good. It\'s when those elements, like navigation, graphics, and the information on the page, get in the way or distract the user, that you notice them. This means the site\'s designer, or website developer, did not do his or her job correctly.

If you\'re an amateur building a website for fun or family, then this may not be as important to you. Most likely, you\'re using an online site builder or free website tool. The professional, however, should be very concerned about these design elements. The only way to know if your elements are correct is practice, revision, and criticism. Look around the \'Net at sites that you admire and focus on these elements to see how they accomplished what they did. Find similar sites and check them and look at sites that don\'t come up to standards and note their mistakes. Learn from other people\'s website development efforts in order to better your own.(click here for learn more "Easy Wibsite 4 U")

Now comes the fun part: experimentation! The best way to learn on your own is to try things. Don\'t be afraid to fail, since it\'s your mistake and no one\'s going to fault you but you. Learn from it and try again. Play around with different concepts of navigation and design, fill pages with useless gibberish or random content so you can see what handling large amounts of written material is like. Make drop-down, hover-changing, and other kinds of menus to see how the buttons interact and the scripting holds up to expansion and changes. Above all, though, experiment with your website development!

Once you\'re confident with your skills, start building your first site—probably your own professional site to sell yourself. The successes during your experimentation are now your portfolio. Good work! Keep working, trying, and succeeding by learning from your failures. Website development is about practice and knowledge. Don\'t let your lack of experience hold you back, but instead utilize your unbounded imagination. Keep trying!

Now that you\'re ready to do something for real, you\'ll need to know some basic concepts about website development to keep your sites well-grounded. You\'ll need to know: what the focus of the site-to-be is, what kind of content will be included with, how much content is expected, how often feedback from the client will be given, and what kind of hosting will the site be on when completed (often the same as during development). There may be other questions, but these are the most basic.

The focus of the site is merely what the site is for: is it a sales site, online store, or glorified brochure. In other words, what\'s the point of the thing? You\'ll need to have at least a rough idea of what kind of content will be used on the site and how much of it (text, graphics, audio/video, etc.) there will be. Some clients are very open to letting you run with their website\'s development and come up with your own, while others want to control the process from start-to-finish and have a clear idea of what they want. This covers the question about client feedback. Most sites are built in stages, with a “skeleton” going up first to solidify the major design elements and the details and content going in next, page-by-page or section-by-section. The question of site hosting is very important if the site is to be anything more than just a cut-and-dried brochure or text-only site—a site that doesn\'t use much or any audio/visual or back-end scripting like shopping carts.

Now the fun begins! Building the site needs to be somewhat organized, but if you\'re given some leeway, take advantage of it and have fun with the concept. Start with organizing the content and creating a game plan for how the site will “flow” or be laid out for the user, from index page to final purchase or final goal. Use this game plan to start building the backbone of your site: its navigation. Square this away first, before you do anything else on the site. The navigation is so integral to the design, website development, and even file structure of the site on the server that it must be the first thing completed and ready to go. Changes to the navigation, once implemented, will probably be difficult and will affect everything else about the site.

Once that\'s done, it\'s a matter of taste and style. Once you\'ve got a feel for your client and their business (and therefore their clientčle), you can come up with a graphical design based around your navigation scheme to make the site great. After that, it\'s mostly just “plug-n-play” with content. Most sites are built on a basic template, which contains the major graphic elements and the navigation. This is because continuity throughout the site is visually appealing and less confusing to the visitor.

That\'s the basics of website development, in just a page or two. There is more to it, of course, but you\'ll learn most of it as you go. Once you\'ve got the foundation I\'ve outlined here, you\'re ready to learn the rest by experimentation. Besides, that\'s more fun than reading some boring article anyway. So have at it!