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

Almost all of website development is about understanding HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and the design elements of making a functional and high ranking (on major search engines) website. When you see a good site on the web, you usually don’t notice the design elements very much, that’s what makes that site superior to the rest. It’s when those elements, the navigation, graphics, and information on the page, get in the way or distract the user, that you notice them. This means the website developer or site designer, did not do his or her job properly.

Note: Want to make money but don't want to go through the hassle of creating your own site and promoting it? Click Here to get 5 completed websites that are already making thousands monthly!

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 and online site builder or free website tool. The professionals, however, should be very concerned about these design elements (the navigation, graphics and content). The only surefire way to know if your elements are in optimal position is to practice, revise and criticize. Look around the internet for sites that you admire and focus on these elements to see how they accomplished what they did. Next, look for sites that don’t match up to standards and note their mistakes and errors. Learning from other people’s developmental mistakes in order to enhance your own can save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars in the long run.

Now comes the fun part, the experimentation! The best way to learn is to try things on your own. Don’t be afraid to fail, since it’s your mistake and no one is going to look down on you except yourself. Learn from it and try again. Play around with different concepts of navigation and design; fill pages with useless content so you can see what handling large amount of written material is like. Make drop-down, hover-over, and other kinds of menus/buttons to see how the buttons interact and if the scripting holds up to expansion and changes. Do not be afraid of trying things!

Once you’re confident with your skills, start building your first website – possibly even one that will go big and earn you a 6-figure income. The successes during your experimentations are now your portfolio, good work! Keep working, trying and succeeding by learning from your failures. Web development is about practice and knowledge, never let your lack of experience hold you back, but instead utilize your unrestrained imagination.

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 stable. You’ll need to know:

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, an online store, or a glorified brochure. In other simpler words, what’s the point of this 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. If your building a website for a client, some clients are very open to letting you run with their website’s development and come up with your own, while others want you to create exactly what they want. Follow what your client wants, don’t get out of hand with extra tidbits if the he/she are not interested, the customer is boss!

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, 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. If your not a design person, don't know how to use PhotoShop or other image creators, try EasyWebsites4U for cheap affordable web designs that come with a free domain, free flash movie, free logo design, free web statistics, and free search engine optimization (higher ranking on google = more free traffic daily).

That’s pretty much the basics of website development, 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 experimenting. Besides, that’s more fun than reading some boring article anyway. So have at it!

All properties on this site belong to their respective owners

Home | Privacy Policy | Contact Us