Design a stunning website with minimum expense and experience

Now a days everyone needs a websites, everyone wants one and it is becoming one of the primary aspects of projecting oneself or a company.

Cost for developing new websites are also getting cheaper every day… there are individuals who can design websites starting from $300 and up…

But there are ways of designing your own websites even without spending that much. When i say designing websites they are usually static website and not dynamic website.

Static websites are those where the details pretty much stagnant , and needs to be manually updated by your self. Company websites, personal websites are some of the common ones in this category.

Dynamic websites are ones which are database driven, they are usually designed using web programming scripts like asp.net, php etc. The are usually backed by database like sql server, my sql etc. Ecommerce websites, blogs etc in this category.

There are templates freely available online that are already laid out. They can be easily used to create a stunning website. And with a little bit of knowledge of using photoshop and playing around with CSS . You can make this site stand out and will not look like the template that you just downloaded. As you have guessed right, downloading and using a template without any changes means, thousands of other people may be doing the same, and all the websites look alike.

Now what is a template, usually designers when they design websites, they design a template first and use this template to create html pages, the advantage is if there is a change in the pages, for example logo or image changes, they need to be reflected in the ‘X’ number of pages. Manually going through these pages and changing is BIG headache. If templates are used, make the changes to the template and BOOM all pages are automatically updated.

CSS or cascading style sheets holds fonts, background colour, font colour etc used in a website. Earlier days usually these styles were embedded into each webpages, but now designers use css pages, which is more like a text page with all the description of the font size, type of font, background colour etc relating to webpages are mentioned and in each webpages,these styles are referred using CLASS function.

A quick search on google for free website templates revealed a astounding 24,900,000 pages http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=free+website+templates&btnG=Search&meta=

This is one of my favourite template site, as it gives you numerous idea about designs: http://www.freewebsitetemplates.com/

Now downloading a template from this website will give you a PSD format file, which is a photoshop format of the front page that you see there, and also a html page with all the web graphics.  Now using this html page we can multiply numerous other pages. If you want to change the image, i suggest you should, find a relevant image to replace with, using the same measurement as the one used in the html page. Buttons can also be replaced the same way.  If its the text in the image that you want to replace, use the PSD file and make the changes. To replace the text used in the webpages, you can do this by opening the html page in a html editor, i prefer Dreamweaver, and edit the text.  I know initially all this seems a headache, but for the time being until you become proficient this is the amount of work required.

One thing to remember, to host a website, an index.html or index.htm or default.html or default.htm should be there, web server automatically looks for this page, this will be the home page of your website.

To sum up, the tools used for design website:

HTML editor: Dreamweaver – CSS can also be edited using this software

Image editor: Adobe Photoshop

Templates- search in google

Creativeness – Your own

In addition to above, you will need a domain and web hosting account. Usually this comes together with most of the hosting companies and will range from $50 per yr plus… 

And if you have multiple websites for example, you need one website, your brother or sister needs one and your parents business needs one, or simply all your buddies websites can be put into one account to save money, the cost effective way is to buy a multiple domain hosting package so that you can put all your domains into one account, rather having separate hosting accounts. This usually costs around $25/month and usually lets you host around 10-15 domains

Therefore individually they might cost 50 x 10 (domains) = $500 per yr

Multiple domain account = 25 x 12(months) = $300 per yr (for 10 domains and over)

Happy Designing!