The advancement of the internet made online presence an important aspect in the success of a Business or organisation. So a website seems to be a good option to consider. A web designer USA charges $24 per hour on an average. So, if you can’t invest much, there is always an option to create a website on your own. This post guides you on how to design a beautiful website on your own without investing in a web designer USA.

Figuring out the WHYs and WHATs

Designing your website on your own is great. This might be a great opportunity in coming out of your comfort zone. Thinking of designing your website especially when you are not a designer is daunting in itself. You might be baffled with the various options that are out there. So have a clear picture in your mind about why you are taking this journey. The why needn’t be the same as the time goes on but it is just reasoning with yourself on why you want to take on extra labour coming out of your regular job.

Try figuring out answers to the question like this: Who are your clients? What can you offer them? Why do you think you can do a better job? What do I need to put on the website?This helps you in figuring out what exactly you want your website to do for you.

Identifying the pages

When you don’t know what to do it is best to look for inspiration, so that you can kick start your adventure. Try taking a look at the websites that have captured your attention. Figure out what gets you to get attracted to those websites. Note down the basic structure that they have used. Now think what might work with you for getting people interested in your work and services.

Now you get to come up with the main elements of your website. This will help you in mapping out your website by defining the main pages that you need. This will also give you an idea on how they will be connected to each other and help you build the skeleton for your website.For the main elements you might be confused on what to choose: Homepage, About page, Services, Career, Blog, FAQs, etc.  Always answering some basic questions will greatly help in narrowing down your options. What does your Audience need to know about you? What do you want to tell your audience? What type of content might help you in establishing your message? How do you need to present all this information so that the message gets to your audience exactly the way you wanted? Okay you got answers to your questions

Here is what the some of the pages do:

●  Homepage: It is the landing page of your website. It is the first page your audience gets to see. They should get a fish eye view of what your website is about.

●  About page: This page needs to give out basic information about your business, you and your team, contact information, location of operation and the work hours.

●  Services: Depending on your business or organization does. Give your audience what services you offer. Provide links to detailed pages to know more about those services

●  Careers: You might want to recruit new members for your business or organization. In this page, highlight the available posts and its requirements. Also mention how the interested people can reach out for the post.

●  Blog: Blogging consistently gives your audience more information regarding your services and a better view of your business or organization.

Sketching the skeleton

Now picture how your website should look. Start sketching the layout of your website. This means you need to decide where each page comes and how they are linked to each other. Remember for the end of the process, the navigation between the pages should be smooth and easy for your audience. You also need to sketch the layout of the individual pages of your website. This will clarify you on deciding where the content  of each page goes. Try to accommodate a lot of white space and avoid cluttering of your content so that people would like to come back to your website. You achieve this by just making a simple sketch on a paper or use more sophisticated tools like Sketch, Figma, etc. Using the tools means you will be able to create a mockup of your website that resembles the website in your mind. But a rough sketch is sufficient to get you started.

Drawing your content

Now start to write the content for each page. Finalizing your content before selecting the template of your website has an important perk. It ensures that the template you are going to choose is able to compliment your content exactly. So it avoids wasting your money on unsuitable templates for your website.Make sure to provide links to relevant pages within your website.

The contents set the voice of your website. You need to keep in mind your target audience and accordingly set the voice of your website. You can set the voice to be casual when your audience are people looking for productivity services or formal when your services are for CEOs of companies.

Getting comfortable with colors and fonts

As you are done with writing your content, you get a complete idea about your brand and what exactly it does.Adding colors increase the visual appeal of your website. Choose your colors that complements your business. This choice influences how your audience perceive your business or organisation. There are a ton of colors out there and each means something different. The understanding of what different colors means gives you an edge in communicating with your audience. Try to narrow your options to just three to four colors: One as main color, one to two as accent colors and one fond color. Be consistent with their usage from one page to another. Using the same colors for creating your logo, further help in maintaining the consistency.

Use of images would be great

Images and infographics make your website look beautiful and add to the visual appeal of the website. It also helps you tell your story in an interactive way. They do so by evoking the emotions of your audience who visit your website.

A good use of photos helps you to stand out from your competitors. So try to use stock photos from the same photographer. This helps you to maintain visual consistency and might also add trustworthiness to your website. Also try selecting less used stock photos and it helps in preceding your uniqueness. There are many sites like Unsplash, Pixeles, etc that can provide you with quality stock photos.

We know that content plays a great role in shipping your business. It is only possible when your audience are able to read the content. So how the content looks, also impacts the perception of your business or organisation. This comes under typography. It also determines how your audience interacts with the website. So avoid using competing fonts or those that are difficult to read. If not done so, your audience won’t be able to read your information and navigation within your website becomes difficult. At the end it leads to bad user experience and less traffic to your website.

Gaming up for a great User Experience

Now you have a beautiful website that gives great visual appeal. The navigation is seamless within the website but your pages load slowly. This again greatly affects your website traffic in a bad way. Design is not only about how it looks but also how it works.

So optimise your website by using a CDN network that enables your website much faster. It does this by using servers near the audience region to load pages. Also compressing your images and graphics greatly decrease the load times.

As much of the internet traffic is coming from smartphones, make mobile responsive website

Testing your website

Test your website by changing one element at a time. This allows you to see if that change adds to increase or decrease in user experience and optimize your website for great website experience.

About The Author :-

Hermit Chawla is a MD at AIS Technolabs which is a Web/App design and Development Company, helping global businesses to grow by Global Clients. He love to share his thoughts on Web & App Development, Clone App Development and Game Development.

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