Creating (designing) your website

Now you have a good idea about how your website should looks like. Now it is time to start coding. You really don’t want to have a very good knowledge about programming languages to build your website. There are many options you can go with, following are few methods.

You can hire a website designing company or person
You can code yourself
You can use a web designing software such as Microsoft Front Page or Adobe Dreamweaver.
Or you can download a pre-designed web template and change it accordingly to your needs.

You have to decide yourself which option is best suit for you and that will depends on money, time and effort that you are willing to take. Actually there are no specific option that we can recommend to you because each one has advantages and disadvantages. We will not discuss very briefly about each of above options.

Hiring a Web Design Company – I think this is the easiest way to create a website if you don’t have much time and you are willing to spend comparatively (to other options) a higher amount of money. One advantage of hiring a web design company is that they have more experience than you and they are in the field, so, they know very well about your needs, and certainly they will advice you on how to do better than your plan, identifying downturns of your plan.

But you have to be careful before choosing a web design company, because there are lots of Web Design Company as well as freelance developers. You must always ask for references of their previous works. You may also want to call some referees and see what their responses are. Then you can choose the best company for your project.

You should also think about your budget (of course you will do) when choosing a company. It may have a very reliable customer list and they may do very well in the business, but what if they are not within your budget. So in this case, you have to move to the next best choice. Talk with the company and try to convince to lower the price and see that their pricing methods are transparent and no hidden costs. Also you have to remember to find out about their after sales customer service, whether they are reachable after the sale and they will provide a good customer service.

When you meet web designers at the web design company, they will give you many ideas about how to design the website and how it should looks like and so on. So, you have to ready for this situation, because they don’t know about your business or even your target markets. So, you have to know very well about what your objectives are and how you want your website to develop and even how it looks like.

Coding a website yourself with HTML – This is the hardest way to develop a website and also the cheapest and cleanest way to develop and website. That because when you coding you know exactly what you doing and how it will interact with the web browser. So the final product is a very clean website. But if you are comfortable with some other programming language or even not learning HTML is very easy. If you can spend some time by playing around HTML codes you will soon understand that it is not that hard to learn. You can find a very simple HTML tutorial at www.w3cschools.com site.

Using a web designing software – If you decide to develop your website, this will be the best choice for you. Many web designing software are very easy use by experimenting little more you will soon get mastered with it. If you know to use Microsoft Word then you probably can develop a website with Microsoft Front Page, because there are lots of similarities between these two applications. The advantage of using a web designing is that you don’t want to worry about HTML codes, what ever you do (type, draw, insert images, etc) on the screen will be automatically converted into HTML by the software itself. Finally you get what you see on the monitor. This is called as WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). Its very simple. The most popular web design software are Microsoft Front Page and Adobe Dreamweaver. Addition to these advantages, most web design software offers pre-designed website templates that you can use to create your website. You can change certain features of this website and use it as your website. Now here also like before, you have to be careful before choosing web design software. There are lots of commercial software and free software. Ask from your friends and other resources find out what will be the best for you.

There is another cheap option, that is downloading a pre-designed web template and change is according to your needs. There are many websites that offer web templates for free as well as for a small price. This option may be easy but it is really not a good idea if you are planning to bring your offline business into online because there may be many other websites in the same design since the same template could be downloaded and used by many others. But if you have a home based small business, then this wont be a problem.

Next let’s see how to set up your shop online.