subject: Web Design Tutorials - Teach Yourself [print this page] A website can be really simple, tedious or difficult to make depending on how complicated you need the website to be. Websites that more focused on showing important information should have minimal designs while websites that are advertising products or services should be more graphical convince visitors to buy into them. Even if you already know how to make your own website, you can be generating the wrong message by coming up with a design that is not in line with the goals of your site.
Prevent making the wrong design by getting yourself exposed with some attractive websites that have the same target audience as your website. To find these websites, head to a search engine like Google and perform a search using a keyword phrase that you would expect to take people to your website. You should find plenty of results that lead to different websites with different designs. Figure out what these sites have in common so you know what type of elements you need to have on your site. You can also look at the footer of each website and see if the webmaster or designer of that site used a template. The name of the template should be clickable so you can see the homepage of the group that made the template. If that template is made available for free download, you are in luck. From there, you can edit the template using a WYSIWIG or "What You See Is What You Get" program. These types of programs are recommended because you do not have to learn any coding to build or edit a website. When you are finished designing the website, don't forget to look at the source code so you can understand how HTML codes can affect the design of your website.
If you cannot find a decent template, you can still practice your web designing by trying a simple graphics editor. The idea is to create a simple layout of your website from header to footer. Because a lot of graphics editors make it easy to drag and drop other images to form layers, you can position the elements of your site exactly without worrying about the codes. Some of the better graphic design tools allow you to export to an HTML format so you can upload the generated website to your web hosting provider immediately. If it does not have that feature, use the website mockup you made as a guide for making the actual website. You can also use the same graphics editor to create a site map so you know how many pages you need for your website and how to link them together.
Once you are finished with your basic design, show it to other people so you can get some advice on how you can further improve your design. You might even learn some nice tricks along the way as long as you are willing to try out new things.
