Learning how to design your very first website can be a challenging task. It may even take months or years to learn and master the fundamentals. Although starting out in web design can be a bit difficult, it’s still a worthwhile experience if you’re prepared. If you want your start in web design to be a smooth one, here are a few tips to consider from the very beginning:
- Ensure that you have the website’s content prepared
The first step in designing your first website is to make sure you have the content prepared beforehand. The content includes contact information, text, photos, and other relevant information. All of these should be ensured before jumping into creating the graphics. Designers like you should use the real content for the site when designing it. Doing so will provide you with a better idea of how much space you’ll require for the content. Thus, if you want your web design experience to be a seamless one, you should know that the design should be made to fit the content and not the other way around.
When getting your content together, you can do this by getting it from your client or by writing the content yourself. Moreover, you can hire a copywriter, a photographer, or search for fantastic stock images. Regardless of what you do, get your content and images together and organized.
- Develop the skills that you’ll need
Doing a web design professionally means you’re going to require a variety of skills. Therefore, you have to pay attention to enhancing these skills for building and designing a website:
- In addition to business and communication skills, you also need to be familiar with the user experience design. It’s about learning how people utilize websites and convert that knowledge into a talent to create a superior site design. However, you should be careful because the way people use websites may be different from the way you do.
- Another vital skill is the aesthetic one. It’s about learning how to code your designs to make your website look attractive. However, developing this skill can be a tricky thing because the color scheme and font you like may seem wrong to other people. In such a scenario, you should always know the basic rules in web designing and be creative in your craft.
If you’re looking to hone your skills in web design and development, taking online courses like HubSpot Academy’s new graphic design course can be helpful for you.
- Create style tiles
After structuring and planning your site, the next step is defining the fonts, color scheme, typographical styles, and other aesthetic stuff. This is where creating style tiles becomes essential. Style tiles consist of fonts, colors, and interface elements that make up your site’s design. With this collection of visual elements, it’ll be easier for you to play around with them until you come up with the right combination of imagery, colors, and fonts while styling your site. That way, you can make your website stand out.
- Be familiar with the concept of requirements engineering
Dealing with any web project doesn’t only need skills on how to code or design, but it also requires a better understanding of some necessary organizational skills. When you’re familiar with requirements engineering, you can be able to formulate documents and keep software requirements for your project. To do that, you should have the right tools.
Aside from popular project software like JIRA or Basecamp, you can take advantage of more awesome tools that are available in the market. They can be used for collecting tasks, planning your milestones, and analyzing the progress of your project. So, check out some of these fantastic project management tools and determine how they can help your project and workflow.
- Use a programming-friendly text editor
Getting a programming-friendly text editor is a requirement for every web designer and developer. This kind of tool is the place where you’ll have to spend most of your time designing your website. That said, it’s important you have the best option available to you. Whether it’s Eclipse, Vim, Sublime Text, and many more, pick the right tools that work best for you.
- Coding
When coding, you have to open up your text editor and the main browser to begin typing. As you keep typing code, a page is formed in the browser, which is a combination of the structure and style you planned. Also, during this process, you may have to do some resizing of the browser to know what your site looks like in various screen sizes. In such a case, you may have to make trials and errors to create the best web design.
- Test your website
After having all of your necessary code in place, it’s about time to begin testing your site on the browsers you have. By doing this, you may discover more bug fixes and other small inconsistencies. However, you don’t need to worry too much about these issues. What’s important is to make sure that your readers can view what you’re selling, and that they can take some action based on the info you’ve provided in your site.
Conclusion
You don’t have to know everything, especially if you’re starting out in web design. You’ll sometimes run into new challenges and issues. However, you can avoid some of the complications by taking all the skills you’ve learned, and the knowledge and experience you’ve gained. Thus, use this guide correctly and become a successful web designer.