How To Design A Website? A Complete Guide For Beginners

Web page design is one of the main components that help to attract more viewers to browse your page. If the website performs an appealing visual and operates smoothly, viewers are most likely to stay longer and tend to explore more content on your website. 

To best create a perfect branding website design, most website owners are willing to pay a budget to hire expertise from Website Management Services by utilizing their technical skills and advanced tools. However, website builders can help with simple website designing without paying much. This article will show you step-by-step how to design a website.

How To Design A Website From Scratch?

Designing a website from scratch used to require a high level of editing skills from programmers and designers. Therefore, businesses need to research the cost of designing a website. 

Fortunately, with the development of technology, many website builders offer free and paid packages that include various features to create web page designs with just a few drags and drops. Here are 9 website steps design you should follow:

1. Determine the website’s purpose
2. Research and plan out content
3. Design visual branding
4. Choose website builders
5. Choose a template
6. Set up the page layout
7. Optimize user’s experience
8. Make the website becomes mobile-friendly
9. Test and launch your website

Step 1: Determine The Website’s Purpose

Once you’ve determined the purpose of website design creation, you can start structuring a textual and graphic presentation to engage visitors as the following website steps design.

Regarding simple website designing, our primary objective is to provide an appealing user experience and attractive design. Still, we also need to qualify the demand of target audiences. To best determine the most accurate goals, ask yourself these questions:

• What is the web’s target audience?
• What objectives does the content strategy of your company have? Does it focus on engagement, education, and driving sales?
• What actions do you expect readers to take when opening your site? Browsing product’s page? Make a purchase? Read content? Or sign up for the newsletter?
• What tone and voice do you want to implement while speaking with visitors?

Step 2: Research & Plan Out the Content

Once you’ve determined the why, what, and how of website design creation, you can start structuring a textual and graphic presentation to engage visitors as the following website steps design.

You can start the simple website designing by researching your competitors’ web page designs and their meaning, paying particular attention to the UX vs. UI experience. Additionally, browse their content for headlines, images, or other elements they’re implementing to draw your attention. 

Make a mood board once you’ve gathered notes and insights from the research, which are perfect since they let you consolidate your findings and make the visuals look more appealing. A mood board can also be a foundation for developing a brand’s identity when building website design.

See more: What is lean UX?

Step 3: Design Visual Branding 

It is essential for the brand to obtain unique visual branding to enhance its visibility and stand out from competitors. Consider these factors in your brand template:

• Color scheme: Color significantly impacts brand identity. Think about the brand emotions you want your customers to associate with, which you can consider your target customer age. 
• Typography: Typography includes typefaces and fonts, which refer to the overall text’s art and design. While designing a website, do not forget to update your progress to see how your text arrangement and the website structure might look for a new visitor. 
• Imagery: Imagery encompasses various factors on a website, consisting of photography, illustrations, animations, and icons. 
• Voice and tone: A brand’s voice originates from the overall business’s goals and objectives, divided into characteristics such as informative, relative, and accessibility when delivering a message to your customers.

Step 4: Choose Website Builders

It is now the time to start designing a website. The first step in website steps design is to choose the right CMS platform that best suits your business’s skill set, budget, and purpose.

When mentioning the ultimate option for website builders, it is not something else but WordPress. This CMS is excellent for businesses to design and develop website, from extensive eCommerce shops to online directories and digital resumes. It is a top pick for content creators due to its stand-out blogging features.

To publicize your website and make it accessible for everyone when using WordPress, you must buy a web hosting provider. Many individuals and small businesses recommend a shared hosting package as the most budget. 

While WordPress is a good option, other website builders offer both free and paid packages which still provide exclusive web page design functions for businesses to customize, including:

• Wix
• Shopify
• Webflow

Step 5: Choose A Template

Choosing a theme or a template is the following website steps design. Template a file that has already been structured and developed by a web designer, who includes the pre-build layout and graphic components. Its goal is to make creating a website for non-technical users easier.

Depending on your CMS platform, many templates or themes will be free for the brand to customize. Whether you’re a novice or an experienced designer, there are options to help you build ideas from available templates or UX personas, which make them easier than starting from scratch. In order to fit your brand identity and style, you can adjust components like color, typeface, and other graphic elements using templates as a reliable base. 

Step 6: Set Up Page Layout

There are 5 mandatory pages located within a website, including:

• Homepage
• About page
• Contact page
• Blog page
• Product or service page

Homepage

When building website design, the homepage is where the first user experience performs. Therefore, it must deliver the website’s purpose and main key message. The homepage must maximize this initial visit to attract users and make them keep browsing through other content.

Focusing on the unique selling proposition (USP) or a statement that expresses what makes your company unique. Or, it could be a stand-out homepage design, which is best used for new businesses or emerging brands in a competitive market.

About Page

You can put more detailed information about a specific person, business stories, or the ‘behind-the-scenes’ within the About page. This page is suitable for sharing your narrative, communicating your beliefs, and building a stronger relationship with the audience. 

To further establish your reputation, including your social media accounts on the About page is recommended for a simple website designing.

Contact Page

Creating a contact page as part of the website steps design is an excellent way for visitors to contact you using the provided information. It often includes the company’s contact information, including phone number, email address, social media accounts, or company location, if possible (with a map feature).

To hold users’ footprints on your page, consider including a contact form on the Contact page so that users may send an inquiry without leaving the page with no message. 

Depending on your favorite, the form can send your company’s email address or record every inquiry submission in the internet platform’s database. 

Blog Page

Only individuals or companies implementing blogging as a content marketing strategy consider this page where they want to attract the most visitors when building website design.

A typical blog page has snippets from the blog postings on the left side in reverse chronological order. A sidebar with the blogger’s profile and various call-to-action buttons may be featured on the right.

Product or Service Page

A product page is essential for e-commerce or commercial website owners when performing design and develop website. There are two aspects to consider in this category:

• Catalog page: Usually displays the available products or offers services
• Specific product or service page: this landing page shows a specific item in more detail.

It is essential to look at your competitors for suggestions because the web page design depends on the goods and services you are providing. Here are some tips to make the website design creation experience more exclusive: 

• Include a filtering and sorting system: this helps to speed up the process of finding the desired products and services.  
• Display several images or videos as proofs: display at least six to eight images to offer a quick preview of the product to convince customers of its worth. 
• Write an appealing description of your product or service: to make the product more persuasive, address how it might alleviate the problems your target audiences are having. 
• Show practical experiences: public consumers’ reviews or feedback can establish trust and helps purchasers have realistic expectations of the good or service. 

Step 7: Optimize User’s Experience

Making the website user-friendly and maximizing the user experience are the next steps in learning to design and develop website. Here are some crucial factors to consider in this website steps design:

• Navigation: Visitors are more likely to examine your website’s whole content when the website has an easy navigation system. One way to ensure simple navigation is to employ a flat site layout or a design-appropriate menu when designing your website.
• Visual hierarchy: This is the strategic arrangement of the page’s elements. Choosing a layout depending on a user’s reading style is one method to include visual hierarchy in a website design creation. 
• Page Speed: The number of graphic elements may significantly affect how quickly a site loads. To reduce loading times, you can minify web resources, develop a basic design, and optimize media files.
• Accessibility: Include alt text for photos, consider keyboard accessibility, use clear and meaningful URLs, and use an accessibility remediation tool to improve the accessibility of a website.

See more: What is wireframing?

Step 8: Make The Website Becomes Mobile-friendly

Mobile friendliness is more critical than ever due to the rise of mobile users. Google considers mobile-friendliness as a decisive component for ranking in their SERPs. Here are some approaches to improve the website’s mobile friendliness: 

• Use a hamburger menu: This menu bar saves more screen space by hiding all the links under a three-lined button, usually accessible on the top left of the page.

• Create touch-friendly CTAs: The button should be big enough to tap with your finger. Additionally, there should be a lot of space between each button to reduce user errors. 
• Make scrolling easier: Use tools like a sticky navigation bar, a back-to-top button, or scroll-triggered effects. 

Step 9: Test & Launch Your Website

Before public your website, test its look to see whether there are any coding errors or design flaws that can interfere with the user’s experience. 

Inquiring about the opinions of close relatives, friends, or coworkers is a simple method to achieve this. Please set up a recorded video meeting and ask them to share their screen while they browse the website and offer feedback on how it looks and works.

A/B testing is an alternative website steps design. This approach occurs when the designer makes two versions of the same website and delivers them to various user groups. They can compare the two versions to discover which works better when the study is complete. 

With higher data usage, this approach to building website design can reveal what aspects of the website are effective and ineffective. However, test all graphic designs to analyze the most influential factor better. 

Another smart move is to use a heat map. This program can examine any website and identify the sections or factors consumers will pay the most attention to. It can help optimize the web content placement to maximize conversions.

Why Is Web Design Essential?

Designing a website is essential since it is the users’ first impression of your brand or business. Users only engage with a site for a brief period. Therefore, creating a unique experience is what we use to maintain customers’ interest, and web page design is one of the decisive factors.  

Above all, website design creation significantly influences customers’ purchasing decisions. Many researchers show that online shoppers will only buy a second time if the product is suitable on their devices.

Brand recognition is another exclusive role of web page design. This method is approachable by maintaining visual consistency on all marketing platforms, which makes it easier for the target audience to identify your business’s identity.

Finally, website design creation matters for SEO. If visitors find your site difficult to navigate, search engines will likely perceive it similarly. As such, the bots may need help crawling the content for indexing and ranking purposes, especially if you don’t have a sitemap.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Tools Can You Use to Improve Your Website Design?

While there are thousands of builders platforms out there when building website design available in both free and paid versions, we have selected the ten most popular tools to design and develop website, including

• WordPress
• Wix
• HubSpot
• Squarespace
• Canva
• Shopify
• Framer
• Webflow
• HostGator
• Pixpa

See more: UX UI design service.

What Makes an Effective Website Design?

Based on the initial objectives, you can measure the site’s effectiveness when analyzing its progress. For instance, blogging is considered efficient when the content successfully delivers your target message to the audience and maintains their interest in the site. 

Here are some metrics you can use to check whether it is an effective website design creation:

• User-friendliness: All contents and sites are accessible for visitors to see and click.
• Clean layout: Page structure allows users to scroll and search for their desired content. 
• Readability: The fonts, colors, and layout are pleasant and well-combined to attract users.
• Aesthetic consistency: Use the same graphic elements to maintain visual harmony, brand identity, and ease of use. 
• Speed optimization: To rank high on SERP, every website detail must be appropriately optimized to enhance the page’s speed. 

In short, an effective web page design often focuses on enhancing user experiences and raising their interest to keep them browsing throughout the website. 

Although website design creation requires advanced skills or industry experience, the process of how to design a website is more simple than many people think. You can hire a professional web designer to build a beautiful website if you have the necessary skills and resources.