Designing the Site

After you have gathered all the technical prerequisites together, it is the time to design your site. In fact, you could have done this earlier, using your own computer to host the site — and now just transfer the ready site to the selected host, test it in the live environment and launch it.

Typically, things are not that easy. Designing a good site is not easy, as can be seen from the hordes of bad sites all over the Internet. Your site has to be visually pleasing, easy to use and still printable. Start of with usability and visuals, and fix printability later.

First, turn off computer and take a few sheets of paper. Think of the brand of your site. Do you already have a brand? Do you want to establish a brand? Creating a brand for your site and developing the brand along the site helps you to stand out of the sea of mediocrity (= competitors). For an excelleny guide for branding, consider reading The Designer’s Guide to Brand Strategy, made generously (but partially) available by mdn studio.

After branding, figure out the major sections of your site and try to guess their relative weights (to your visitors). List the contents you are going to write for each section, and consider whether you are going to include some services there, too?

Use this information to create your site structure. In Nomadig.com, we have generic info (Nomadig), a blog (Journal), travel info (Travel Tips), techie pages (Gadgets) and financial info (Money). There may be more later, time will tell. In all of these sections, there are several pages of content.

When you know the structure, boot up the computer and start to create the layout for the site. I personally work out first the content page template — that is the common layout for every page except the front and the entry pages. When I’m satisfied, I distil the front page from the content page template. If I need an entry page, I’ll design it as the last, based on the front page.

Remember that the front page has to make an impression and lure the visitors to continue to the content. The content pages have to make sure that the visitors found their way and will come again. Make sure that your designs are expendable, so you can later add new sections, remove pages or even sections — without too much of hassle.

The next step is to write the HTML. Use the best suited tool, I personally prefer emacs, to craft the code. If you’ve designed sites before, you know what can be done with HTML and automatically take that into account during visual design. If you haven’t, you’ll learn the hard way. While writing the HTML, one usually writes the CSS style file and saves the images in proper format (GIF, JPEG and PNG). Good image manipulation tool, such as Photoshop, is a gem in this task.

Create HTML template for the content pages and then duplicate it to every content page, tweaking the navigation and other bits, and piece by piece the site grows. Write also the front page and possibly also the entry page. Test everything, using several browsers and operating systems, if possible. Use your friends to review and debug the site.

If you are not able to design the site by yourself, consider buying the design from TemplateMonster or similar service. They provide you the required HTML templates and images, you just tweak them to suit your preferences and then publish the site.

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