Web Design

Are you on a plan to create a website online? Well, the virtual commerce space renders prospective business opportunities and it’s important that your site online. Your website is just akin to the land based brick & mortar outlet, created to cater to virtual audience. Website creation is no rocket science and it just takes a few steps to start your portal over the internet. The article here is a comprehensive A-Z website creation guide for the beginners.

Select domain name

The primary most thing you need to do while creating your website is selecting domain name. It’s the name of your website and is akin to the business registration name of any land based commercial outlet. The domain names can be bought from web hosting companies. It takes around 11USD per year for the domain name service. The ideal domain name must be cool, catchy and should be able to provide a hint of your business- as otherwise you might end up getting irrelevant traffic mostly. Go for a simple selection and try to avoid the complicated domain names.

Select web host

The next step here is to select your web host. If domain name was like the business registration name, the hosting service is like the land space you buy or rent for setting up an office. In the online zone, web hosting refers to the virtual space you are taking to place your website over the internet. In simple words, the hosting space offered would act like a home for your website. However be careful while choosing your web host. Always settle with a highly reputed and seasoned one. Make sure that your hosting company is ready for a 99 percent uptime so that your website stays visible always. Moreover, the hosting company you would be taking to should be able to render 24/7 technical support facility. 

After signing up for the hosting account, the site owner is required to point his domain to the hosting account.

Design the web pages

Albeit web designing can be performed by the professional designers, you can perform it yourself only. There are a great lot of web designing tools available today to help you with your DIY web designing mission. You will get to choose from both free & paid web designing tools. One of the most prominent here is WordPress system. WP is unanimously accepted as a highly efficient portal that can offer you a great professional-looking site, sans any need of technical know-how. It’s to note here that WordPress comes with several interesting layouts for every sort of business. Moreover, it’s also easy to manage your site content with WP.

Site testing

After you have designed the website, it’s time that you test the website in varied major browsers such to check out on its compatibility with them. You must check out the website compatibility with IE, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Firefox.

Site submission

The final step is to submit your site to popular search engines like Bing & Google to make it visible to your target audience online. 

Wish you all the best with your new site.

Are you looking for out of the box web design layouts? Well, here is a brief on 20 highly innovative web layouts to pick from.

• Use horizontal layout for your web page where the navigation would be carried out through slides, eliminating the need to travel to a distinct page.

• You can use background image of your site as a binder that will contain the page contents. The tabs by the side of the binder will help in navigation.

• If you are into a pharmaceutical business, you can use a bottle as your site background image that will have the needed information wrapped up on its label.

• Another idea is to get the picture of someone in the background image who would be holding a board displaying the needed details.

• Then, you can have a wooden floor as the background where the site information would be designed as tiny notes scattered on the floor.

• A good idea would be to have no text content but just a big image for the homepage. The image would be set on center with navigation available on both the sides.

• Get a big image for left part of your layout & the right part would hold primary navigation & content in narrow columns.

• Place attractive pictures of your main services on the homepage and embed the navigation facility on each of the photos that would direct the visitor to the respective service page.

• Horizontal long layout is quite a unique thought today and would provide an edgy touch to site over those with the regular standard vertical scrolling layout.

• It would look really interesting if you separate the main homepage into left & right layouts- one will contain your personal information & other the business details.

• Place navigation at the home page center in an angular way. The content would be stated in brief in right lower corner.

• Black background will look really vibrant- match it up with light shaded vibrant tabs that would contain the navigation facility.

• Use simple header with navigation facility and a big image will cover up maximum of the site. As the visitor would star scrolling down over the image, hidden columns will come up with basic information.

• Get the layout of a conference table for the background image and place the site information on the center of the table

• You can create a colorful collage containing varied images of your products. Now, place a plain white box over the collage to display information. 

• Another idea is to get a wooden box as your background image with navigation embedded in different open drawers in the box.

• You can also use an open book as the background image with the information laid out on its pages.

• A wonderful idea is to create the background image with the collection of small product images that would appear under a light shadow. Over the shadow you will have rectangular tabs of text passing by on pristine background.

• Get a bright image on the right hand side of the page while the left hand would contain navigation links on a light backdrop.

DIY web designing is always economical than offering your site to any professional designer. The smart entrepreneurs today with basic sketching and computer designing skills prefer to design their sites all by themselves. The good news is that the trendy digital web design scenario offers you a versatile range of web designing tools o pick from. Below is extended a list of essential tools for every web designer in 2020.

Adobe Creative Cloud

It’s needless to mention that every web designer swears by Illustrator and Photoshop tools. The Creative Cloud offers you easy accession to both of these essential tools, accompanied by many other functional aides like- Kuler, InDesign & Typekit. 

0to255

The tool simplifies the process of finding out variations of any set shade. It is a fantastic web designing aide for the highlights, active states and rollovers.

UI Faces

It’s usually difficult to find the perfect picture for the mockups. But not any more- thanks to UI Faces the job is a lot easier now. The edgy web designing tool compiles avatars through Twitter & allows the users to deploy them for their web designs.

Samuel L. Ipsum

It is a placeholder generator of Lorem Ipsum that assists in filling in the content voids both off & online. Samuel L. Ipsum comes in 3 versions- a regular Lorem Ipsum option, an interesting version with clean quotes derived from the Jackson movies & a more dynamic variant with profanity-laced quotations from Jackson flicks.

Google Fonts

If you are bored with typical old Courier, Arial or Georgia fonts and looking for something really edgy with your latest web layout typography, Google Fonts can be really helpful. The tool is designed with a vast gallery of ready-to-use fonts which could be downloaded right during mockup stage. The good news is that the very functional tool is available completely free of charge. 

Responsive UI Stencils Sketch Pad

The Responsive UI Stencils Sketch Pad can be your ideal companion during your preliminary website layout designing state. This dotted grid helps you to design in proper measurement to the lines & allows a neat visualization of the website in browser & on mobile devices. 

ColorZilla

The tool assists the web designers in their major color related activities for the web layout. The free tool is meant to help you in both advanced and basic color functions- thanks to its diverse range of edgy color aides like Eye Dropper, Color Picker, Gradient Generator etc.

Pictaculous

Pictaculous is created by the Malichimp creators. It’s a free of charge unique color-palette generator which is a must-have for every contemporary web designer. You just need to upload the desired image & the shades within your image would be sampled to generate a customized color scheme. 

Balsamiq

It’s a latest wireframing tool that can be used to come up with brainstorming mockups of the user experiences.  It allows you to design mockups for mobile, tablets and web.

Less Framework 4

The free tool helps to come up with adaptive websites. It is designed to fir almost any browser device. The tool contains 3 typography presets and 4 layouts. 

Are you on a plan to create your web design layout? Designing a web layout is not that hard and some basic Photoshop & sketching skills would be enough for your DIY web layout mission. Below, goes a brief highlighting on the tricks required to design a great website layout.

Begin with paper sketches

It’s true that ultimately you have to design with the Photoshop but before you proceed that way its better that you start with paper sketches. A good design needs to be based on a neat layout which would ensure that  you are clear about the exact theme of the design prior to highlighting it through Photoshop. The paper sketch will allow you to come up with the basic layout design framework making it easier for you to further develop it through the shadows and gradients of Photoshop.

Add grid for PSD

Before you go out to start your design with Photoshop, you are required to come up with a grid. It’s because the grid renders a measured outline for your layout structure and without that the design might not come up that good. The grid is meant to structure your layout of varied sections. It would guide on particular screen-size requirements & assist in creating responsive templates. Besides, a grid also takes care of consistent spacing for the layout you are about to design. In short, the grid is needed to perfect your design in terns of measurements and alignments. 

Choose typography

Then, you have to be choosy about the typography to be used on your layout.  Not all fonts can be suitable for every theme of business- for example, the typography would more of casual and stylish for an advertising website while it would always be formal for an education portal online. The suggestion is to use no more than 2 pertinent typographies for the layout. Make sure the fonts are easily readable. Get big fonts for titles to make them more catchy.

Choose colors

The presence of various colors will surely offer a vibrant feel to your layout but if you are looking for a poised minimalist approach take to 2 contrasting shades. The lighter one would be used as background for the text portion. In case you are using multiple shades, make sure that these are never too loud on outlook & do no diminish the weight of the site.

Divide your layout

Your website definitely features variety of information which must be placed in distinct spaces. Thus, the web layout must be divided into different sections to hold the separate sections of information about your website. 

Detailed attention

Web designer testing or designing new website. New website layout on laptop screen. Professional man working in creative marketing and communications agency office. User interface and responsive page.

Every bit of your web layout deserves good attention- be it some unexpected animation, some subtle stroke or a tiny gradient in some button. Detailed attention to every aspect of the website makes the overall layout natural and believable. 

Responsive web layout

You have to come up with a responsive web layout which will enable the website to appear in customized sizes as per the specific display size of the browser device- be it a tablet or smartphone or a laptop. 

WordPress is undoubtedly the most favored platform for web designing. WP assures easy content management and edition, making website design and operation northing less than a breeze. Have you too got a WordPress site? Well, that’s smart since WordPress is a Google favorite and hence can ensure top authority for your website. But having WordPress as your website portal won’t be enough. You have to learn the very tips and tricks needed to optimize a WP platform. 

Choose a strong web host

This is one of the most crucial tips when it comes to WP optimization. You must make sure to settle with a solid web hosting company that can assure a powerful hosting facility for you. It’s advised that you compare your website’s response time with that of the contenders to see how much you are lagging or leading in the industry. The hosting plan you are taking to should promise you 99 percent uptime and no compromise on speed even when the site encountering a heavy traffic. Always remember that fast navigation is one of the major keys to achieve higher ranks over search engines.

Fast WP theme

WP carries a huge theme gallery but not all the themes are meant to functional equally. Badly coded themes slower down navigation speed and are always menacing when it comes to site optimization. Thus, you have to get hold of a fast WP theme which can assure a speedy loading. It’s to stress here that the fast themes are especially SEO compatible and hence would be able to confirm proper optimization of your WordPress site. 

Adaptive themes

Make sure that the WordPress theme you are taking to would be compatible to various browser devices like tablet, smartphone, laptop & desktop. The contemporary online users generally prefer to browse from the tablets or smartphones & hence you have to ensure that your site theme would get easily customized according to the different sizes of browser devices. 

Monitor the plugins

Yes, plugins are very essential to enhance the functionality of WP sites but you must know that there are some plugins that can really affect the site speed. Thus, be careful about the plugins that slow down your site & only install the plugins where necessary- too much of plugin can actually crash down your server.

Empty WP Trash 

The WP Trash is no doubt a useful provision from WordPress but you must know that the function eats up a great lot of space. This in turn greatly affects the speed of the website. Thus you must be careful to empty the trash after every 7 days. 

Optimize the pictures for web

The images take up huge room and affect the navigation speed greatly. Thus before you place pictures on your website, you must make sure to optimize them for the web to ensire proper optimization of your WP site.

Consider Ad load

Advertisements carry huge load and badly affect the site speed? Hence it’s advised that you don’t overstuff your site with advertisements- besides, don’t forget to check the speed before & after placing the ad on your site.